Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Biden’s Latest Nod to Trump-ism – Israel-Palestinians Policy?

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Abraham Accords, Antony J. Blinken, Biden, Binyamin Netanyahu, Blob, China, diplomacy, Donald Trump, Gaza, globalism, Hamas, Israel, Jared Kushner, Middle East, North Korea, occupied territories, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Palestinians, tariffs, Trade, two-state solution, West Bank

As known by RealityChek regulars, one of the leading – and most surprising – features of the Biden administration is a tendency to continue certain Trump administration policies that the current President, and much of the globalist bipartisan policy Blob decried as dangerously naive, xenophobic, short-sighted, isolationist, protectionist [feel free at this point to insert your own scornful epithet].

Now on top of tariffs, China trade and economic strategy, and North Korea policy, there’s a sign that the Biden approach to the Israel-Palestinian conflict can be added to the list. My evidence? Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken’s remarks this morning on the latest eruption after a meeting in Jerusalem with the Jewish state’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu.

The most specific policy statements Blinken made focused tightly on the need for reconstruction aid for Gaza – where Israeli military strikes aimed at stopping Hamas rocket attacks inflicted serious damage – as well as the need “to work to expand opportunity for Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank, including by strengthening the private sector, expanding trade and investment, and other means. Assistance and investment like these will help foster a more stable environment that benefits Palestinians and also benefits Israelis.”

By contrast, there were only the most glancing references to resuming diplomatic efforts to bring lasting peace to the region – principally, Blinken’s report that he and Netanyahu discssed “other steps that need to be taken by leaders on both sides to set a better course for their shared future. As President Biden has said, we believe that Palestinians and Israelis equally deserve to live safely and securely; to enjoy equal measures of freedom, opportunity, and democracy; to be treated with dignity.”

And beyond that – nothing. Not even a mention of a negotiated two-state solution that President Biden continues to support as the end goal of U.S. diplomacy.

That looks awfully Trump-y because a focus on economic development in Israel’s occupied territories to ameliorate their populations’ pressing day-to-day needs and create credible hopes for decent living standards and further progress, and an unmistakable deemphasis on returning Israeli and Palestinian leaders to some kind of bargaining table, was a definite hallmark of the former President’s approach to dealing with the conflict. The idea was that the promise and growing reality of prosperity on the West Bank and in Gaza was the best hope for reducing the appeal of violence and creating the conditions in which realistic compromises could – some day – be accepted.

Indeed, Trump’s peace plan conspicuously began with a purely economic proposal – a fund raised from private investors in the Persian Gulf states and other countries that would spend $50 billion over ten years on infrastructure and development projects in the occupied territories. As the plan’s main author, Trump son-in-law and White House advisor Jared Kushner explicitly stated upon its unveiling, “Today is not about political solutions — we will get to them later.”

And although Mr. Biden just issued a re-endorsement of two-state, it’s more than a little interesting that during his Senate confirmation hearings, Blinken acknowledged that “Realistically it’s hard to see near-term prospects for moving forward on that.” That’s hardly a sign of perceived urgency. Perhaps more revealing: The numerous recent articles (all pre-dating the latest Middle East fighting) reporting Mr. Biden’s determination to deemphasize the Middle East as a U.S. foreign priority to begin with – and evidence the administration was following through in official policy declarations and staffing decisions.

Not that this relative indifference marked a significant change in candidate Biden’s campaign positions. In fact, he praised the Trump “Abraham Accords” that normalized relations between Israel and several Arab countries. And although Mr. Biden did charge that Trump’s strong pro-Israel tilt had made a negotiated Israel-Palestinian settlement “even more difficult,” his campaign’s main foreign policy statement didn’t even mention the issue. (Perhaps that’s because he reserved his more detailed – and somewhat more critical – verdict for his campaign’s articulation of a policy toward “the Jewish community.”)

But the foreign policy Blob’s judgement were much harsher – largely because Trump was seen to be recklessly ignoring the Palestinians’ legitimate aspirations and the supposedly obvious reality that not only was peace between Israel and the Palestinians was impossible without taking the latter’s interests seriously, but that meaningful progress toward pacifying and even stabilizing the entire Middle East was as well. (See, e.g., here and here).

It’s an exaggeration to say that the President has now repudiated this pre-Trump conventional wisdom on the Israel-Palestinian conflict. But he’s clearly in no rush to embrace it. And given his other adoptions of Trump-ian stances, it strikes me as evidence that not only is Mr. Biden moving away from pre-Trump globalism, but that the days of this strategy dominating American foreign policymaking writ large are numbered themselves.    

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: No Common Sense, No Peace in the Middle East

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Aaron David Miller, Arabs, Bill Clinton, Blob, Camp David, Ehud Barak, Gaza, globalism, Hamas, Henry A. Kissinger, Israel, Middle East, Nathan Thrall, occupied territories, Oslo Accords, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Palestine Liberation Organization, Palestinians, PLO, Robert Malley, settlements, Six-Day War, United Nations, West Bank, Yasser Arafat

If I was a gambler, here’s a big bet I’d make:  As certain as the continuation of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is, the continuation and worsening of the (often well-meaning) delusions and (often willful) ignorance it’s spawned is even more certain.

I’m not talking about some of the worst absurdities generated by the most recent fighting – like claims that the big excess of Palestinian over Israeli casualties reveals some special degree of ruthlessness on the Israeli side, or an equally special need for Israel to display more restraint responding to rocket attacks on its people. Leave aside for now the precautions Israel clearly has taken to minimize collateral damage or the Hamas fondness for human shields. Israel’s light losses have nothing to do with its enemies’ scruples – not when you’re talking about the firing of literally thousands of projectiles. Instead, this enormous number of rockets took such a meager toll largely because of effective defenses. Put differently, if Hamas didn’t kill many more Israelis, it wasn’t for lack of trying.

Instead, I’m referring to more polished talking points that for decades have dominated the debate over this conflict as conducted inside U.S. administrations, among most elected national officials, and by the mainstream bipartisan globalist foreign policy “Blob” of academics, former officials, think tankers, and journalists. Not that these views are all in perfect lockstep, but the central idea, in its current form, is that the Israelis’ are now so much more powerful than any combination of their enemies that the most sensible course of action to take is cutting the Palestinians a break. In victory, magnanimity, as Winston Churchill famously said. But rather than make entirely affordable concessions, Israel has chosen to rub the Palestinians’ nose in defeat, especially with more aggressive West Bank settlement policies and an ever harsher overall occupation.

In one not-trivial way, this new conventional wisdom improves on its predecessor. That perspective held that, at some point, the power balance between Israel and the Palestinians would start tipping against the former – either because the Palestinians, including Israel’s Arabs, would become so much more numerous than the Jews, or because they’d in tandem with their brethren across the Middle East their power would become irresistible). Therefore, Israel’s only hope or long-term survival would be compromising while it still had any leverage at all.

I’ve written previously on why, from an International Affairs 101 perspective, the earlier version of the conventional wisdom was so wrong-headed. Especially in the wake of the first Persian Gulf War, it was so out of whack with the actual distribution of power in the Middle East, and what by even then was the Arab wotld’s glaringly obvious indifference to the Palestinians, that it could only hope to feed Palestinian pipe dreams that they could gain at the negotiating table through a combination of obstructionism and international pressure what they could not possibly win on the battlefield.

But the uproar over the latest fighting is exposing two intimately related flaws in the new conventional wisdom that are comparably serious – and far more important than childish squabbles over who fired first, or about acceptable and unacceptable levels of force.

The first has to do with Israel’s own alleged obstinacy. However inflexible or high-handed Israel may or may not seem today, there can be no question that the Jewish state has at various times pulled back to varying degrees – including the dismantling of settlements – from various territories taken over after the Six-Day War of 1967. The Palestinian leadership has moved on important issues as well – chiefly on Israel’s right to exist in peace (in the Oslo Accords of 1993). But these two instances of compromise could not be more dramatically different .

Israeli territorial concessions – including withdrawals from the Sinai peninsula (completed in 1982) and Gaza (completed in 2005), from Jericho on the West Bank (1994), and from some West Bank and Gaza settlements freezes and even  some teardowns (in the early 2000s) – entailed tangible assets that directly enhanced the security of this geographically tiny state by making it less tiny. Moreover, although Israeli settler groups have periodically violated these Israeli policies, the Jewish state’s decisions have been the product of an international actor that is capable of enforcing its agreements and that has chosen to do so.

The Palestinian concessions on Israel’s right to exist in secure conditions entailed intangibles that had no material affect on the regional strategic situation because the Palestinians have always been powerless to end Israel’s existence. Indeed, they conferred on Israel no benefits that the Israelis could not substantially gain for themselves – and in fact had gained because of their military superiority.

Just as important, Palestinian leadership groups have never effectively eliminated threats to Israeli lives and property emanating from their community for any substantial period of time.

The question of whether these Palestinian groups could not or would not eliminate these threats has been actively debated, but from the Israeli standpoint, the matter is completely academic. What counts have been the results, and they’ve been sorely inadequate, to put it kindly. In other words, until Israel has reasons to believe that further concessions will result in major, lasting payoffs, the case for such flexibility or magnanimity or however you describe it will be an understandably hard sell.

The second fatal flaw in the recent conventional wisdom has to do with the belief that many more significant Palestinian concessions would be in the offing if peace talks began. The Arab-Israeli conflict may fairly be said to have begun in an act of Arab (including Palestinian) rejectionism – of the 1947 United Nations plan partitioning what had been British Palestine, and which led to Israel’s creation in the first place. This rejectionism, moreover, set a revealing precedent: In the ensuing war begun by the Arab states, Israel won some 50 percent more land than the UN plan allotted it.

These two patterns of Israeli flexibility and Palestinian rejectionism seem to have been illustrated most tragically (and especially for the latter) at the Camp David peace talks in 2000. There’s been no definitive account of the last-minute breakdown of these negotiations, and therefore it hasn’t yet been possible to confirm widespread claims that Palestine Liberation Organization leader (PLO) Yasser Arafat bears most of the blame. But I’ve been struck by the following two observations by former U.S. diplomats involved in the Clinton administration mediation efforts and who are by no means pro-Israel hardliners.

The first comes from Aaron David Miller, a 25-year State Department veteran who worked extensively on Middle East issues. Writing on the twentieth anniversary of the Camp David talks, he recalls that then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak “went further than any Israeli prime minister had gone before” – and on core issues “like borders, security, refugees, and of course Jerusalem’s ownership.” Yet Miller continued, his proposals were nowhere close to what Arafat needed….”

As Miller explains, the PLO chief was tightly constrained by the demands of hardliners in his own organization and those even further out on the extremes, and given the brutal nature of Palestinian and wider Arab politics, understandably feared that any departure from the rejectionist line would bring a bullet into his head. And Barak’s own ability to bring Israeli opinion along was doubtful at best, especially since his political future looked doubtful.

So his argument that the U.S. mediation effort was doomed from the start, mainly it seems because the issues dividing the two sides were “mission impossibles” (but also because the American President made serious tactical goofs), and that the blame for failure was shared, appears reasonable at first glance.

But this interpretation would be genuinely constructive only if the Palestinians and Israelis were then or are now somewhat evenly matched. That’s not remotely the case. Most crucially, the Camp David failure shows that, as desperate as the plight of the Palestinian people was not only at that moment, but had been for decades, their designated representative ruled out of hand decisions that could alleviate their present suffering and build a foundation – however fragile and, yes, uncertain, for future progress because they wouldn’t deliver unalloyed, immediate victory. Indeed, as the author notes, Arafat “was in no hurry to reach any kind of agreement” and had even warned his American hosts that “a premature summit might lead to an explosion.”

Arafat’s warning proved prescient, since Palestinian forces retained impressive capabilities to spark what Miller calls “a hellish descent into violence and terror” for the region. But their continuing inability to triumph or meaningfully change the military facts on the ground ensured that their own already immiserated people would pay by far the highest price.

Revealingly, Miller’s account is roughly paralleled by a piece from a former Clinton administration colleague, Robert Malley.

Malley is plainly much more sympathetic to the Palestinians, and their leaders, than Miller. And perhaps the sharp edge in this article reflects its writing practically in the immediate aftermath of the Camp David failure, rather than from two decades into the future.

All the same, it’s significant that he portrays the years of diplomatic near-paralysis that preceded Camp David as ones marked by “more Israeli settlements, less freedom of movement, and worse economic conditions [for the Palestinian people].” Further, Malley implicitly accepts the view that “Barak broke every conceivable taboo and went as far as any Israeli prime minister had gone or could go” – again, unquestionably important given the lopsided balance of power.

And although the author writes that “Strictly speaking, there never was” an actual offer from the hyper-cautious Israelis, he also argues that proposals presented by Clinton several months later – albeit, near the very end of his presidency – “showed that the distance travelled since Camp David was indeed considerable, and almost all in the Palestinians’ direction.” He goes so far as to add that

“Offer or no offer, the negotiations that took place between July 2000 and February 2001 make up an indelible chapter in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Taboos were shattered, the unspoken got spoken, and, during that period, Israelis and Palestinians reached an unprecedented level of understanding of what it will take to end their struggle.”

Yet Arafat still said No, in the evident belief that his most prudent response to an unusually promising opportunity for something better was a veiled threat was rejecting the good in favor of his concept of the perfect. Why was he acting even in the slightest bit picky, however, despite the inevitable result of condemning his people to even more hardship?

As I wrote above, the answer to this paramount question – beside which all the debates surrounding the latest Gaza fighting are harmful distractions – is that Palestinian leaders have been encouraged to assume that any number of (thoroughly irresponsible) international actors (e.g., members of the UN General Assembly and even Security Council) could eventually hand them the clout they have no potential to win through their own devices. The result – which in their eyes evidently has been worth long-term suffering in the West Bank and Gaza – would enable them to deal with Israel at least as equals and possibly, in combination with a near-global consensus, as superiors.

And my confidence in this conclusion has just been borne out upon reading a third piece on failed Middle East diplomacy whose author (an analyst at an entirely mainstream Blob-y think tank) lays the blame overwhelmingly on Israel (while curiously admitting that it holds all the regional power cards and that its preference for a fundamentally secure status quo over a promised rosy future makes perfect self-interested sense).

According to Nathan Thrall, the Palestinians have long hoped that “the support of the majority of the world’s states” will “eventually result” in the kind of two-state agreement that these states have repeatedly make clear they support, but one that is totally unhinged from relative power considerations – that in fact mocks these by pretending that Israel’s pre-1967 borders are adequately secure – and that does nothing to assauge Israeli concerns paper promises that its new Palestinian counterpart will be willing or even able to halt attacks from its own territory.

In a 1974 interview, former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger ruefully observed that Americans “believe that every problem is soluble,” are “at ease with redoing the world,” and suggested that his compatriots instinctively rebel “against the pragmatic aspect of foreign policy that is security-oriented, that achieves finite objectives, that seeks to settle for the best attainable, rather than for the best.” He linked this confidence with favored geographic circumstances that obscured the tradeoffs that, for less fortunate countries, are often the inescapable price of simply scraping by.

For all its current advantages, it’s difficult to imagine a country with less in common with the United States in these literally existential senses than Israel. The sooner a critical mass of Americans and their leaders recognize this gulf, and its implications, the more helpful they’ll be able to be not only to the Israelis, but to the Palestinians, who have for so long been the greatest victims of Middle East delusions.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: More Reasons to Doubt Those “China Century” Predictions

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China, GDP, gross domestic product, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, per capita GDP, population, Taiwan, The Lancet

Predictions that China will soon overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy are now commonplace (see, e.g. here) – and understandably so given how much faster than America the People’s Republic has been growing in recent decades. As a result, I was startled six weeks ago when I came across data punching lots of holes in this forecast, and called attention to them in this post.

Still, as I explained, the implications were mainly economic – indicating that Americans and their businesses had much less to fear than widely supposed from a substantial U.S. decoupling from China because the Chinese people’s overall purchasing power would be hard-pressed to keep growing nearly as fast as generally assumed. That was because China’s gross domestic product (GDP) per capita – the amount of wealth it was creating for each of its huge, one billion-plus population – was growing at distinctly unimpressive levels. In fact, it was 

In terms of overall national power, however, and China’s consequent ability to threaten American national security, I noted that plenty of reasons for worry remained – because the narrowing of the U.S.-China gap in terms of the actual sizes of their economies meant that China’s ability to pour resources into its military and its security-related tech industries continued to threaten to surpass America’s.

But this week, new figures – on China’s population – have called these concerns into question, too, at least over the long run.

The data – China’s own new census – revealed that the People’s Republic’s population growth has slowed to a crawl. The numbers bested some forecasts – which anticipated Beijing reporting an actual population decline. But because this near-population stagnation has resulted largely from trends unlikely to be reversed any time soon (mainly the regime’s draconian multi-decade population control policies and the major rise in living standards that China unquestionably has achieved), they also add to the evidence that the People’s Republic is heading into a period of long-term population shrinkage. In turn, this fall-off – coupled with the weak China per capita GDP growth mentioned above – indicates that its world’s biggest economy status could be surprisingly short-lived.

The math underlying this analysis is pretty simple – and since the time frames are long, the specific results should by no means be taken literally. But the story they tell differs so dramatically from the current conventional wisdom, and because one of the key assumptions looks conservative, they deserve to be taken seriously.

Let’s begin with those per capita GDP figures. According to the World Bank, in 2019, it was $65,298 for the United States, and $10,217 for China. And let’s look at recent population predictions that have attracted considerable attention. They come from the prominent medical journal The Lancet, and peg the U.S. population growing by some three percent between 2017 and 2100, and hitting 335.81 million, but China’s population falling during the same period to just 732.89 million – a nosedive of nearly 50 percent.

That’s stunning enough by itself, but take a look at what these numbers would do to the two countries’ GDPs. Let’s assume that America’s GDP per capita in 2100 stays at its 2019 level of $65,298. Multiply that by the 335.81 million U.S. population, and you get an economy whose total output is $21.93 trillion (before accounting for inflation). If China’s GDP per capita stays the same, this calculation produces a GDP for the People’s Republic of just $7.48 trillion before inflation That is, its economy would be just a third the size of America’s. Moreover, this means that the economy gap will have doubled, since China’s $14.280 trillion GDP as of 2019 was two-thirds the size of America’s $21.433 trillion (again, according to the World Bank).

Granted any number of non-economic and economic developments over the next eight decades could make this scenario completely meaningless. But leaving out those utter unknowables, it’s significsnt that one plausible knowable suggests that the U.S.-China economy gap may become even bigger in 2100. And that’s the fact that the data I cited in March (from the International Monetary Fund) show that since 1980, that U.S.-China per capita GDP gap has widened substantially. If that trend continues (as opposed to per capita GDP differences staying exactly where they are now, as my scenario assumes), then by the turn of the next century, the United States would stand even further ahead of China. In principle, the military potential gap would widen strongly as well.

And just as crucial to keep in mind: If China’s population plummets by nearly half by 2100, big time decline will have to have begun long before, which translates into a relatively brief spell of Chinese superiority in terms of that military potential. Further, this Chinese edge may be even more fleeting than these dry numbers indicate, since the United States by all accounts maintains Number One in that regard now, and military potential doesn’t turn into military strength overnight.

Nonetheless, there’s still a worrisome paradox to keep in mind. Precisely because China’s long-term prospects aren’t terrific, some leading strategists (see, e.g., here and here) argue that Beijing will be sorely tempted to capitalize on its relative gains to date and momentum to achieve high priority goals in the short-term – like taking over Taiwan.

I personally have no idea. And I’m the last person to preach complacency in China policy. In fact, I’m glad to see that the American political system has begun wakening to the dangers posed by China’s economic, technological, and military advances. But excessive pessimism has never led to any victories in any kind of struggle or competition, either, and hopefully The Lancet data will reinforce U.S. leaders’ confidence that if success in handling China isn’t guaranteed, it’s entirely achievable.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Grave Doubts Still Justified About Japan’s Reliability Against China

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alliances, allies, Asia-Pacific, Biden, burden sharing, China, deterrence, globalism, Indo-Pacific, Japan, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, semiconductors, South Korea, Taiwan, Yoshihide Suga

The more I read about last week’s summit in Washington, D.C. between President Biden and Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, the more I’m reminded of that expression ”putting lipstick on a pig.” For far from the unalloyed success described by the Biden administration and so many of the press accounts (see, e.g., here and here) the results of the meeting can easily be seen as just the latest sign that, from the U.S. standpoint, the so-called alliance between the two countries still can’t be counted on to pass what must be the acid test of such relationships – and at a time when Tokyo’s support looks more important than ever.

The reason Japan’s contribution counts can be summed up in one word: Taiwan. As known by RealityChek readers and many others, the island has emerged in recent years as the world’s leader in the knowhow needed to produce the world’s most advanced semiconductors. These devices of course are not only the electronic brains of all those wonderful high tech devices we all enjoy using – and need. Microchips also control most of the highest tech weapons in America’s military arsenal, and the ever more capable versions that will be turned out by factories (or “fabs”) on Taiwan and, to a lesser extent, in South Korea, will power the cutting edge weapons that will determine victory and defeat on the increasingly electronic battlefields of the future.

If Taiwan was located, say, in the Caribbean, its semiconductor manufacturing leadership mightn’t be such an urgent problem. But it’s sitting in the South China Sea a scant 100 miles from China, which has not only become a powerful rival to U.S. interests in Asia and all over the world, but keeps sounding increasingly determined to take control of the island – which it regards as an outlaw province.

Once upon a time (when Taiwan wasn’t nearly so important), the United States could be sure of deterring a Chinese invasion or military operations aimed at resting major concessions from Taiwan’s government, or of actually defeating such Chinese actions. Now, though, as RealityChek reported years ago, the U.S. nuclear edge needed for high confidence deterrence is gone, and it’s widely agreed that the non-nuclear military gap has narrowed considerably as well – especially for a conflict in China’s backyard.

Which is where Japan (and other U.S. allies in the Asia-Pacific – now more often called the Indo-Pacific region) come in. It would greatly increase the odds of both U.S. deterrence, and victory if need be, if Washington could count on Tokyo to fight alongside America’s military if a war over Taiwan heaven forbid broke out. This is the acid test I was talking about up top. Any military planning for war needs to know for sure what assets it can absolutely rely on when the shooting starts and what assets are only “maybes.” And the results of the Biden-Suga summit left way too many maybes.

It’s true that Japan has added significantly to its military strength in recent years – though such a wealthy country can afford to spend much more. It’s also true that Japan has agreed to take on more responsibilities for preserving security in that Indo-Pacific region. Moreover, the joint declaration issued by the two governments after the summit specifically mentioned “the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait and [encouraging] the peaceful resolution of cross-Strait issues.” Similar recent statements by Japanese officials during Mr. Biden’s term are widely considered breakthroughs in terms of Tokyo’s recognition of the situation’s gravity.

Suga actually added in remarks to reporters following the summit that “We agreed to oppose any attempts to change the status quo by force or coercion in the East and South China Seas [where Taiwan is located], and intimidation of others in the region.” So that sounds like a somewhat more assertive description of Japanese intentions on Taiwan.

But “oppose” could mean all sorts of things – a stern diplomatic note, a few sanctions. Maybe a very stern note. Or lots of sanctions. Neither Suga nor any other Japanese leader has said “If China attacks Taiwan, we’re sending in our troops, too.” In other words, uncertainty over Japan still leaves American war planners with a big problem.

And much more is involved here than my own personal skepticism. As noted here, even if Japan ultimately agrees only to provide logistical and other forms of non-combat support to U.S. forces fighting over Taiwan, itse home islands would run major risks. For due to China’s “ability to launch missiles to virtually anywhere in Japan,” Beijing could target “bases that the U.S. military would rely on for executing operations” and inflict major casualties on Japan.

Further, Tokyo’s distinct reluctance to voice full-throated condemnations of Chinese human rights violations and even atrocities for fear of disrupting lucrative economic ties raises even stronger doubts as to Japan’s willingness to participate in a full-fledged war with its leading trade partner. Indeed, in a post-summit event, Suga repeated another recent mainstay of Japanese diplomatic rhetoric:  “[W]e must work to establish a stable and constructive relationship with China.”

Given these considerations, it should be apparent that words alone simply can’t resolve legitimate doubts about Japan’s real intentions or likely responses to outright Chinse aggression anywhere in the region except for its own territory. 

I’m a foreign policy realist – someone who emphasizes the inevitably central role played by unsentimental, frankly selfish, judgments about concrete interests in all countries’ formulation of their foreign and defense policies. So I’m the last person to complain about Japan’s continuing caution and hedging as such. I can think of many compelling reasons for Japan to become more gung ho – e.g., does Tokyo really want to see China’s thug totalitarian government as the kingpin of its own neighborhood?. But this is a judgement for the Japanese people and their leaders to make.

Japan’s fence-sitting obviously also represents a challenge for American diplomacy, and President Biden has made improving cooperation with allies a centerpiece of his foreign policy. But major skepticism is justified as to whether he and his aides can turn Japan into a military ally worthy of the name, since their globalist emphases on alliances can too easily turn into prizing smooth ties for their own sake, as opposed to firm insistence on greater burden- and cost-sharing that’s bound to ruffle feathers at least in the short term. In fact, signs of such alliance fetishizing have already appeared in administration agreement to ease pressures on both Japan and South Korea for paying the costs of hosting U.S. forces clearly essential to these own countries’ defense.

And in this vein, this foot-dragging by Japan (and most other ostensibly staunch U.S. allies, too) raises a crucial question for Americans. Should they keep allowing their leaders to keep prodding and cajoling these countries in the hope that someday they might demonstrate plausible reliability?  Or should they conclude that the meager results of literally decades of prodding and cajoling mean that the success that’s so desperately needed should be written off as a pipe dream? As shown by rising tensions over Taiwan in particular, the clock is ticking – and quickly.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Biden’s Real Afghanistan Mistake

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Afghanistan, Biden, border security, Democrats, Donald Trump, jihadism, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Putin, Russia, September 11, Tajikistan, Taliban, terrorism

Isn’t President Biden supposed to be a foreign policy whiz? If so, why has he just stuck the United States with the worst of all possible worlds with his announcement Wednesday that all American military forces would be withdrawn from Afghanistan by September 11?

Mr. Biden’s big mistake isn’t promising to pull all the troops out by a date certain. It’s definitely a mistake, for all the (obvious) reasons noted by critics. Specifically, it tells the fanatic Taliban insurgents that if they just wait a few more months, the only obstacle they’d have left to taking over the country (and gaining the capacity to give the world’s jihadists all the kinds of advantages they enjoyed from the support of a sympathetic sovereign state, a la before the first September 11) will be the current, clearly ineffective Afghan government and its military. (America’s allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization – NATO – have stated that they’re withdrawing their troops, too.)

But as I’ve written previously (see, e.g., here), the reestablishment of a national terrorist base in Afghanistan need not expose the United States to devastating terrorist attacks once again. The reason? Because “fighting ’em there so we don’t face ’em here” has always been sounder in theory than in reality. After all, “fighting ’em there” means chasing extremist groups around the Middle East for as long as that completely dysfunctional region keeps producing them – i.e., a very long time. 

At the same time, I’ve continued, there’s always been a way to prevent “facing ’em here” – by more effectively securing America’s borders, so that they can’t get “here” to begin with.

And here’s where we come to the President’s biggest mistake: Not only is he pulling the troops out of Afghanistan without improving border security. He’s pulling them out while substantially weakening border security with his raft of Open Borders-friendly immigration policies. So jihadists soon will both be free to resume organizing and training in Afghanistan and face a much easier challenge slipping back into the United States.

What he should be doing instead (and Donald Trump didn’t emphasize this crucial combination, either) is what I’ve been recommending for years: Pursuing the goal of keeping the Taliban off balance by keeping small contingents of U.S. and allied special forces units in Afghanistan to conduct harassment and disruption operations while putting into place the tough measures needed to make America’s borders truly secure. Once the latter have been completed, the American soldiers could safely leave. This strategy is much more promising than any tried to date because not only is controlling the Middle East intrinsically difficult – at best – but controlling America’s own borders is clearly far easier.

Interestingly, Mr. Biden himself clearly recognizes that the U.S. military’s Afghanistan mission hasn’t been accomplished completely enough to justify a complete withdrawal. That’s why he promised to “reorganize our counterterrorism capabilities and the substantial assets in the region to prevent reemergence of terrorists — of the threat to our homeland from over the horizon.” and to “hold the Taliban accountable for its commitment not to allow any terrorists to threaten the United States or its allies from Afghan soil.”

What’s missing so far, though, is any explanation of how he’ll “refine” America’s strategy “to monitor and disrupt significant terrorist threats” that could emanate from that country. The monitoring part arguably could work, given the remote surveillance capabilities of the U.S. military and intelligence community. But the disruption part? Without U.S. troops on the ground? Good luck with that, along with holding the Taliban accountable in any meaningful way. For the nearby bases that would be needed to host the American force that the President presumably believes would be on call to do the disrupting etc – at least in a timely way – simply aren’t available.

(Actually, there’s one intriguing possibility: Tajikistan, which borders the eastern Afghanistan region where jihadists have been strongest. But as the afore-linked Politico article notes, it’s “heavily dependent on Russia economically,” and Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s cooperation would be needed. Since its own ill-fated Afghanistan war decades ago, it’s been obvious that Moscow is also strongly opposed to any increase in Islamic extremists’ presence near its own southern borders. But the President and the rest of his party seem to equate any cooperation with Russia with – alleged – Trump-style collusion, so that option seems to be out unless his party’s Never Putin-ers relent.)

As the Politico piece observes, Mr. Biden is putting all of America’s Afghanistan chips on what national security types call an “offshore counterterror approach” – and has long advocated this strategy since his vice presidential days. What’s supremely ironic is that the best offshore counterterror approach by far has always entailed focusing tightly on the entirely feasible task of securing America’s own borders – and that the President has been bent on achieving exactly the opposite.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Return of the Lippmann Gap?

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alliances, allies, Biden, burden sharing, China, defense budget, Democrats, Donald Trump, Europe, globalism, Japan, Lippmann Gap, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, progressives, Russia, soft power, South Korea, Walter Lippmann

No, it’s not the title of a newly discovered Philip Roth novel. Instead, the ”Lippmann Gap” is a phrase coined by scholars to describe the result of a country’s aims in foreign policy exceeding the means available to pursue them.

It was named after the twentieth century journalist, philosopher, and frequent adviser to leading politicians Walter Lippmann, who called attention to its frequency and dangers in his classic 1943 book, U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic. (P.S. In this post, I described a major flaw in Lippmann’s thinking, but he was right about the importance of establishing a sustainable relationship between a country’s ambitions and its ability to realize them.)

Troublingly for Americans, and for other countries that have long relied on the United States for protection, evidence has emerged that the gap could soon return in a big way under the Biden administration – whose principals, including the President, are typically described as diplomatic “adults in the room” making the welcome return to power after the dangerous tumult of the Trump years.

The evidence consists of reporting (see here and here) that the administration later this spring will submit a defense budget request that seeks no new funding over last year’s levels. Of course, this reporting may turn out to be inaccurate. Or the Biden-ites could still change their plans even if it is currently accurate. In addition, negotiations with Congress, which needs to approve these plans, could result in some increases.

Moreover, a flat defense budget request is by no means necessarily bad news for anyone, except for whichever defense contractors lose expected sales to the Pentagon. For example, the Defense Department has long been notorious for wasteful spending. And adopting different priorities, or more efficient weapons and other equipment, could well provide America and at least most of its allies with just as much “bang for the buck” as previously, as changing circumstances produce a shift in deployments from missions judged to have lost some of their importance to missions seen to have become more significant. In fact, I’ve long favored major cuts precisely because the nation spends way too much seeking objectives – like shoring up the defense of Western Europe – which haven’t been necessary in decades, and indeed in theory create greater dangers than they can address.

But there’s no reason to think that such considerations would be driving forces behind a reported Biden defense spending freeze, or near-freeze. And this is where the Lippmann Gap comes in. Because there’s every reason to believe that Mr. Biden intends to expand America’s foreign defense commitments on net, and because in at least one major reason of concern, the main potential enemy (China) keeps strengthening its militaty and has been acting more aggressively in recent years, and because a major object of China’s expansionist aims, Taiwan, has become the manufacturer of the world’s most advanced semiconductors – the computer chips that serve as the brains of an explosively growing number of civilian and defense-related products.

What other conclusions can one draw from the President’s repeated globalist assertions that “America is back,” and that in particular, it means to reassure allies around the world that allegedly become unnerved about U.S. reliability after four years of being (rightly, in my view) harangued by Trump attacks on their own skimpy defense spending, and threats to leave them in the lurch unless their alleged free-riding ends? (P.S. – not only weren’t these threats carried out, but as I noted in this article, in some noteworthy ways, the former President actually bolstered America’s alliance-related foreign military deployments.  Mr. Biden, meanwhile, has decided, at least for now, to let Europe’s members of NATO – the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance – Japan, and South Korea all off the burden-sharing hook, as made clear here, here, and here.)

Indeed, a flat or even reduced Biden defense budget request might come about in part from pressure from Democratic progressives to cut spending significantly. Fifty House members of his party have just urged him to reduce the defense budget “significantly.” And their rationale has nothing to do with the aforementioned potentially sensible reasons for cuts. Their case for a smaller U.S. military emphasizes that

“Hundreds of billions of dollars now directed to the military would have greater return if invested in diplomacy, humanitarian aid, global public health, sustainability initiatives, and basic research. We must end the forever wars, heal our veterans, and re-orient towards a holistic conception of national security that centers public health, climate change and human rights.”

I’m all for many of these particular aims, and also strongly support developing new definitions of national security and how to achieve and maintain it. But the Biden administration seems likeliest not to redefine national security significantly, but at most add these new domestic-oriented objectives on to the existing list of traditional goals. Therefore, if the progressives get even some of what they want, the effect inevitably would be to assume that “diplomacy, humanitarian aid, global public health, sustainability initiatives, and basic research” can substitute adequately for military force in carrying out an American foreign policy agenda that’s growing, not contracting.

Whether or not I believe this (I don’t), or you the individual reader believes, this is beside the point. U.S. adversaries seem unlikely to be impressed with these forms of what political scientists call “soft power.” Hence China keeps boosting its own military budget, and Russia responded to Obama administration Europe troops cuts by invading Crimea and attacking Ukraine.

U.S. allies are reacting skeptically, too. For example, European leaders evidently worry that Trump’s election revealed a strong popular U.S. desire to shed many global defense burdens that the Biden victory hasn’t eliminated. Therefore, there’s been increasing talk, anyway, in their ranks about reducing reliance on U.S. hard power by building up their own. And as I’ve repeatedly written, that would be great for Americans. But it’s sure not part of any Biden plans that have been made public.

A defense budget request fully reflecting the President’s bold “America is back” vow wouldn’t make me especially happy. But it would be far better than one that reopens or widens (depending on your views of current U.S. capabilities) a Lippmann Gap – and indicates to both domestic and global audiences that he really means to carry out globalism on the cheap.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Biden’s Aides Show How Not to Deal with China

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Alaska, Antony J. Blinken, Asia-Pacific, Barack Obama, Biden, China, Donald Trump, global norms, globalism, Hong Kong, human rights, Indo-Pacific, international law, Jake Sullivan, liberal global order, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Reinhold Niebuhr, sanctions, Serenity Prayer, South China Sea, Taiwan, tariffs, tech, Trade, Uighurs, United Nations, Yang Jiechi

You knew (at least I did) that America’s top foreign policy officials were going to step in it when they led off their Alaska meeting yesterday with Chinese counterparts by describing U.S. policy toward the People’s Republic as first and foremost a globalist exercise in strengthening “the rules-based international order” rather than protecting and advancing Americas’ own specific national interests.

This emphasis on the part of Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan simultaneously made clear that they had no clue on how to communicate effectively to the Chinese or about China’s own aims, and – as was worrisomely true for the Obama administration in which both served – unwittingly conveyed to Beijing that they were more concerned about dreaming up utopian global arrangements than about dealing with the United States’ own most pressing concerns in the here and now.

It’s true that, in his opening remarks at the public portion of yesterday’s event that Blinken initially refered to advancing “the interests of the United States.” But his focus didn’t stay there for long. He immediately pivoted to contending:

“That system is not an abstraction. It helps countries resolve differences peacefully, coordinate multilateral efforts effectively and participate in global commerce with the assurance that everyone is following the same rules. The alternative to a rules-based order is a world in which might makes right and winners take all, and that would be a far more violent and unstable world for all of us. Today, we’ll have an opportunity to discuss key priorities, both domestic and global, so that China can better understand our administration’s intentions and approach.”

Where, however, has been the evidence over…decades that China views the contemporary world as one in which peaceful resolution of differences is standard operating procedure, much less desirable? That multilateral efforts are worth coordinating effectively? That might shouldn’t make right and that China shouldn’t “take all” whenever it can?

Even more important, where is the evidence that China views what globalists like Blinken view as a system to be legitimate in the first place? Indeed, Yang Jiechi, who in real terms outranks China’s foreign minister as the country’s real foreign affairs czar, countered just a few minutes later by dismissing Blinken’s “so-called rules-based international order” as a selfish concoction of “a small number of countries.” He specifically attacked it for enabling the United States in particular to “excercise long-arm jurisdiction and suppression” and “overstretch the national security through the use of force or financial hegemony….”

Shortly afterwards, he added, “I don’t think the overwhelming majority of countries in the world would recognize…that the rules made by a small number of people would serve as the basis for the international order.”

Yang touted as a superior alternative “the United Nations-centered international system and the international order underpinned by international law.” But of course, even if you swallow this Chinese line (and you shouldn’t), it’s been precisely that system’s universality, and resulting need to pretend the existence of an equally universal consensus on acceptable behavior and good faith on the part of all members, that’s resulted in its general uselessness.

Meanwhile, surely striking Beijing as both cynical and utterly hollow were Blinken’s efforts to justify U.S. criticisms of China’s human rights abuses as threats to “the rules-based order that maintains global stability. That’s why they’re not merely internal matters and why we feel an obligation to raise these issues here today.”

After all, whatever any decent person thinks of Beijing’s contemptible crackdown in Hong Kong, arguably genocidal campaigns against the Uighur minority, and brutally totalitarian system generally, what genuinely serious person could believe that the United States, or other democracies, had any intention or capability of halting these practices?

What might have made an actually useful, and credible, impression on the Chinese from a U.S. standpoint would have been blunt declarations that (a) Beijing’s saber-rattling toward (global semiconductor manufacturing leader) Taiwan and sealanes-jeopardizing expansionism in the South China Sea, and cyber-attacks were major threats to American security and prosperity that the United States would keep responding to with all means necessary; and (b) that Washington would continue using a full-range of tariffs and sanctions against predatory Chinese economic practices as long as they continued harming U.S. businesses and their employees. That is, Blinken and Sullivan should have emphasized Chinese actions that hurt and endanger Americans – and against which in the economic sphere, Donald Trump’s policies showed Washington could make a significant difference.

It’s possible that in the private sessions, President Biden’s emissaries will dispense with the grandstanding and zero in on the basics. (Although that shift would raise the question of why this approach was deemed unsuitable for the public.) But the Biden-ites weirdly advertised in advance that China’s economic abuses and the technology development threat it poses wouldn’t be U.S. priorities at any stage of the Alaska meetings.

In the mid-20^th century, American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr popularized (although probably didn’t write) a devotion called the “Serenity Prayer” whose famous first lines read “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” I’m hoping someone puts copies into Blinken’s and Sullivan’s briefcases for their flight back from Alaska.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Is Biden Going Trump-y on Russia and Ukraine?

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Adam Schiff, alliances, Atlantic Council, Biden, China, Democrats, Donald Trump, energy, Frederick Kempe, Germany, globalism, impeachment, natural gas, Nord Stream 2, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin

Something weird’s going on with the Biden administration, Ukraine, and Russia, and it could eventually put lots of Democrats in an awfully awkward position.

I’m old enough to remember when helping the eastern European country maintain its independence against Russia’s aggression was considered so important by leading Democrats, along with U.S. foreign policy establishmentarians, that it justified impeaching Donald Trump. For allegedly he illegally slow-walked Congressionally approved military aid to the Ukrainians – allegedly because he wanted to force Ukraine’s government to help him dig up political dirt on then soon-to-be Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

As a result, for months, Americans heard again and again how critical Ukraine’s security was to America’s own security, and how Trump’s actions therefore endangered U.S. national security. In the words of lead House impeachment trial manager Adam Schiff (D-California):

“[T]he military aid that we provide, Ukraine helps to protect and advance American national security interests in the region and beyond. America has an abiding interest in stemming Russian expansionism and resisting any nation’s efforts to remake the map of Europe by dent of military force, even as we have tens of thousands of troops stationed there. Moreover, as one witness put it during our impeachment inquiry, the United States aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there and we don’t have to fight Russia here.”

Mr. Biden has never gone quite this far in public, either as former President Obama’s vice presidential point man on Ukraine, as presidential candidate, or as chief executive himself. Nonetheless, he continually pressed his former boss to provide more and better weapons to the Ukrainians than Obama was willing to approve, indicating he, too, considered Ukraine’s security closely related to America’s own.

Indeed, last year, his campaign issued a statement declaring that “Ukraine’s success will contribute to a more stable and secure Europe, which is in America’s interest.”

More recently, however, President Biden has been sending out significantly different signals. For example, his statement last month marking the seventh anniversary of Russia’s “illegal invasion of Ukraine,” he pledged to “stand with Ukraine against Russia’s aggressive acts” and condemned Moscow for violating “international law, the norms by which modern countries engage one another,” but didn’t draw any direct connections between Ukraine’s fate and America’s.

More concretely, Mr. Biden has been looking pretty slow-walking-ly himself on an issue vital to Ukraine’s prosperity: preventing Russia and Germany from completing a natural gas pipeline that would bypass that country, deprive it of billions of dollars worth annually in badly needed revenues from transit fees from existing pipelines across its own territory, heighten its vulnerability to Russian gas blackmail (as candidate Biden noted himself last year), and increase Europe’s energy dependence on Vladimir Putin’s regime to boot. His press secretary has called the Nord Stream 2 project a “bad deal for Europe.” But the project is nearly finished, and his administration isn’t displaying much urgency. As State Department spokesperson Ned Price told reporters blandly, “we are always looking at pipeline activity that would be sanctionable, so if we see activity that meets that threshold we are prepared to follow the law.”

Not that the administration doesn’t have some good reasons for caution on the Nord Stream 2 project. After all, improving relations with allies like Germany, which were strained by Trump’s “transactional” approach, is a top Biden priority.

Perhaps more important, and revealing, Mr. Biden might be reacting to signs of ever closer ties between Russia and China, since responding to the latter’s rise and increasingly aggressive behavior is also a U.S. priority now. Indeed, just last weekend, leading think tanker Frederick Kempe, whose Atlantic Council sees the world in precisely the kinds of globalist ways as the President, cited growing Sino-Russian cooperation as one reason for America moving away from an indiscriminately anti-Moscow hard line to “a more strategic approach” that would “combine more attractive elements of engagement with more sophisticated forms of containment alongside partners.”

During his first presidential campaign, Trump responded to complaints about his supposedly excessive and even corrupting regard for Russia by asking “If we could get along with Russia, wouldn’t that be a good thing, instead of a bad thing?” and noting possible benefits like defeating ISIS jihadists in the Middle East. No remotely comparable statement has come from the Biden administration, but its deeds on the Ukraine-Russia front are starting to send a similar message. Expect the silence from the Democrats’ ostensible Ukraine hawks and Russia hawks to be deafening.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: An America Last Troop Agreement with South Korea

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alliances, allies, Biden, China, Cold War, deterrence, Donald Trump, Japan, North Korea, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, South Korea, Soviet Union, tripwire

The United States and South Korea have negotiated an agreement on sharing the cost of basing U.S. troops on the peninsula, and the outcome raises the question of why the Biden administration bothered to negotiate in the first place. For the agreement simply endorsed the offer made by the Koreans under the Trump administration. In fact, it clearly signaled to America’s other security allies that under Mr. Biden, the United States will revert to its pre-Trump policies of permitting them to skimp on outlays for their own defense, thereby needlessly exposing the American homeland to the risk of nuclear attack by the adversaries these alliances are supposed to resist.

Let’s begin by remembering why the link between these decades-old alliances and nuclear risk exist in the first place. As I’ve written repeatedly (and most comprehensively here), it resulted from an early-Cold War period American decision to give up on the hugely expensive idea of using U.S. conventional military forces to deter threats posed by the old Soviet Union, China, and North Korea, and rely instead on intimidating these foes by brandishing nuclear swords.

Non-nuclear U.S. forces, however, still played a vital role in this strategy. Their purpose was serving as “tripwires.” It was the prospect of their being destroyed by their superior enemies that was deemed likely to spur U.S. Presidents to use the nukes to save them, and creating the prospect of escalation to full-scale, intercontinental nuclear exchanges that would prevent the initial aggression to begin with.

Of course, if such deterrence failed, and a full-scale nuclear war broke out, the U.S. homeland would probabl become a casualty. But in those days, the gambit wasn’t completely crazy. In the first place, the security of the allies being protected (mainly Western Europe and Japan) was arguably vital to America’s own security. In the second place, for most of the Cold War, the United States possessed either a nuclear monopoly over the potential adversaries, a meaningful edge, or parity. And even the latter was considered adequate to keep the nuclear retaliation threat credible. In the third place, during the early Cold War decades, the allies – all of which were devastated by World War II – simply couldn’t mount serious defenses of their own.

These days, though, the alliances situation has changed dramatically. Most of the allies can still be considered vital assets for the United States. And all of them are now wealthy enough to build militaries capable of self-defense. But they choose not to, preferring instead to rely on those American military tripwires to deter attack and use their national resources elsewhere, thereby ensuring the continuing nuclear threat to the United States.

Significantly, the major ally that always and still has the least significance to America’s safety and well-being has been South Korea. In addition, the ally-adversary wealth gap is clearly widest between South Korea and its economically impoverished, Stalinist northern neighbor. But because of Seoul’s defense free-riding, because North Korea now has built an impressive nuclear arsenal and is nearing the capability of reaching the continental United States with its missiles, and because not even the alliance-skeptical Trump administration elected to remove the tripwire and thus eliminate any reason for North Korea to threaten, much less actually strike, U.S. targets, the alliance-related nuclear danger to America remains and (given North Korea’s unpredictability, could well be greatest) where running this risk is least justifiable.

Not that the Trumpers ignored the situation completely. Before his administration began, the former President did reveal some awareness of alliance-related nuclear security problems – especially in Asia. And although this theme quickly vanished from the list of stated Trump alliance concerns, he did vigorously press all the major allies, including South Korea, to boost their military budgets and pay more of the costs of hosting U.S. forces. In fact, during his term, the former President continued his pre-inauguration threats to remove some of the American forces from South Korea in order to turn up the heat on Seoul. (He actually ordered a troop drawdown from Germany for the same reasons).

The allies – including South Korea – and their enthusiasts in the bipartisan globalist U.S. foreign policy establishment predictably cried “foul,” contending that Trump had turned American alliance policy into a base exercise in “transactionalism” and “shakedowns,” and none more loudly than candidate Joe Biden last year. In an October op-ed for a South Korean new agency he made clear his determination to return to pre-Trump coddling regardless of the nuclear risk to his own country.

“As President,” he promised, “I’ll stand with South Korea, strengthening our alliance to safeguard peace in East Asia and beyond, rather than extorting Seoul with reckless threats to remove our troops.”

And unfortunately for anyone who would put America’s security first, he’s been true to his word. The latest agreement specifying South Korea’s payment level for the 28,500 American troops stationed in harm’s way right up against the Demilitarized Zone that divides the peninsula had run out in 2019. Deadlocking the talks since then had been Trump’s insistience that Seoul roughly quintuple its last agreed-on figure of about $920 million annually to about $5 billion, and consent to renegotiating the amounts each year rather than every five years. (One news account reported that this demand didn’t come from Trump himself, and that the administration eventually decided to call for a 50 percent first-year hike.)

Biden’s solution? Secure a marginal increase from 13 percent to 13.9 percent in the last annual payments offer reportedly made by South Korea. Thereafter, Seoul will boost its yearly contributions at the same rate as it increases its defense budget – which of course by definition remains woefully inadequate, since despite some recent military spending progress clearly spurred by America First-fueled anxieties, it would still require South Korea to depend on American support. (Incidentally, different accounts of the exact terms have been reported here and here.)

The result? The South Koreans are happy that the Biden administration is dealing with them in “ mutually beneficial and rational manner” and not in “a transactional fashion.” A State Department spokesperson was tickled that the deal has kept the “Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment to reinvigorating and modernizing our democratic alliances around the word to advance our shared security and prosperity.” The Mainstream Media’s globalism cheerleaders are impressed that Mr Biden is farsightedly willing to “cut allies a break to build unity in competition against China and Russia.”

And Americans are still one temper tantrum by Kim Jong Un away from either sitting by and watching nearly 30,000 of their soldiers overrun in an invasion, or trying to save them from total destruction and South Korea from armed conquest with nuclear attacks that could bring a North Korean warhead down on a major American city…or two…or three.

P.S. All indications are that the Biden administration is going to stage a rerun with Japan – though as indicated above, this ally is at least more important than South Korea.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Why U.S.-China Tech Decoupling Needs to be Kept Simple

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AI, artificial intelligence, Biden, Biden administration, China, decoupling, National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, tech, technology

“Let’s you and him fight” is about the best expression of cynicism I know of. It’s also often great advice when dealing with a law-of-the-jungle-type situation like world affairs, where advancing your country’s interests without incurring much or any risk is a tactic that’s hard to beat.

As a formula for America’s response to the threat posed by China’s advances in artficial intelligence (AI), though? It’s completely unacceptable because it inevitably results in some portions of the population or the economy or the society or all three making all or most of any sacrifices needed to achieve an important national goal, and others getting off scot free or close to it.

And that’s a big problem with an otherwise very valuable new report from a federal government advisory committee on Chinese progress in this game-changing technology. On the one hand, the authors do a great job in explaining why permitting to narrow America’s lead in AI any further could be disaster for national security and prosperity, and for freedom around the world. As a result, they compellingly argue, grappling with this reality requires “comprehensive, whole-of-nation action.”

On the other hand, although they insist on a massive mobilization of U.S. energy and resources, they also maintain that “The United States can compete against China without ending collaborative AI research and severing all technology commerce.” Not only does this position make no sense whatever, given the Chinese ambitions for AI supremacy the Commission describes and the consequences of Chinese victory. It also means, conveniently, that the U.S. tech sector – from which many of the commissioners come – can keep making big bucks doing business with China.

More fundamentally, though, even if this square-circling policy framework wasn’t so sure to keep lining the pockets of many of the authors, it would still suffer from the intrinsically paralyzing qualities of the idea of “competition” as a guide to or aim for America’s approach to China. Simply put, the idea of competition is simply too complicated.

If you consider this perspective too cynical, or too dogmatic, or both, check out the following from the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence:

According to the commissioners, AI is more than “a single technology breakthrough” or even “general-purpose technology.” It nothing less than a “field of fields” that “holds the secrets which will reorganize the life of the world.’” And not surprisingly, “America’s military rivals are integrating AI concepts and platforms to challenge the United States’ decades-long technology advantage. We will not be able to defend against AI-enabled threats without ubiquitous AI capabilities and new warfighting paradigms.”

That’s because “AI applications will help militaries prepare, sense and understand, decide, and execute faster and more efficiently. Numerous weapon systems will leverage one or more AI technologies. AI systems will generate options for commanders and create battle networks connecting systems across all domains.”

Chief among these AI-progressing rivals is China, which the report says “possesses the might, talent, and ambition to surpass the United States as the world’s leader in AI in the next decade if current trends do not change.”

Specicifally, “China sees AI as the path to offset U.S. conventional military superiority by ‘leapfrogging’ to a new generation of technology. Its military has embraced ‘intelligentized war’––investing, for example, in swarming drones to contest U.S. naval supremacy. China’s military leaders talk openly about using AI systems for ‘reconnaissance, electromagnetic countermeasures and coordinated firepower strikes.’ China is testing and training AI algorithms in military games designed around real-world scenarios.”

Nor would Chinese AI superiority pose military threats alone:

“Authoritarian regimes will continue to use AI-powered face recognition, biometrics, predictive analytics, and data fusion as instruments of surveillance, influence, and political control. China’s use of AI-powered surveillance technologies to repress its Uyghur minority and monitor all of its citizens foreshadows how authoritarian regimes will use AI systems to facilitate censorship, track the physical movements and digital activities of their citizens, and stifle dissent. The global circulation of these digital systems creates the prospect of a wider adoption of authoritarian governance.”

Further, its AI push is such a priority for China that it’s determined to succeed by hook or by crook. The Commission reports that Beijing “is executing a centrally directed systematic plan to extract AI knowledge from abroad through espionage, talent recruitment, technology transfer, and investments.” Also crucial to China’s strategy: It “continues to pervasively steal American IP-protected technological advances through varied means like cyber hacking of businesses and research institutes, technological espionage, blackmail, and illicit technology transfer.”

Yet the AI report also observes that “The U.S.-China competition is complicated by the complex web of supply chains, research partnerships, and business relationships that link the world’s two AI leaders. Dramatic steps to sever these ties could be costly for Americans and reverberate across the world. The relationships between American and Chinese academics, innovators, and markets are deep, often mutually beneficial, and help advance the field of AI. Moreover, it remains in the U.S. national interest to leverage formal diplomatic dialogue about AI and other emerging technologies and to explore areas for cooperative AI projects that will benefit humanity.”

Worse, “Broad-based technological decoupling with China could deprive U.S. universities and companies of scarce AI and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) talent, sever American companies’ efficient supply chains, and cut off access to markets and capital for innovative firms.”

Therefore, the report expresses confidence that “The United States can compete against China without ending collaborative AI research and severing all technology commerce” and that America’s goal regarding China should be “targeted disentanglement as just one element of its overall approach, which, if applied judiciously to key sectors, can help build U.S. technological resilience, reduce threats from illicit technology transfer, and protect national security–critical sectors.”

The Commission even goes so far as to recommend establishing “a high-level U.S.-China Comprehensive Science & Technology dialogue” that would

>”Identify targeted areas of cooperation on emerging technologies to solve global challenges such as climate change and natural disaster relief; and

>Provide a forum to air a discrete set of concerns around specific uses of emerging technologies while building relationships and establishing processes between the two nations.”

Unquestionably, seeking this balance and these mutual gains is appealing in theory, and it would certainly create the best of all possible worlds for U.S. tech companies that profit hugely from their current business with China and clearly envision much more to come, but whose every existence is threatened by the aforementioned predatory Chinese policies. But there’s no reason to believe that this panglossian result can actually be achieved.

In the first place, the report claims that “China’s campaign to explit U.S.-based research violates the research community’s core principles of integrity, openness, accountability, and fairness.”  That doesn’t sound like a terrific basis for mutually beneficial AI cooperation to me. 

Second, as the Commissioners note, “AI is the quintessential ‘dual use’ technology—it can be used for civilian and military purposes. The AI promise—that a machine can perceive, decide, and act more quickly, in a more complex environment, with more accuracy than a human—represents a competitive advantage in any field. It will be employed for military ends, by governments and non-state groups.”

In effect, they’re acknowledging that even the most seemingly benign AI progress fostered by Sino-American cooperation can and will be used by China for military and other threatening ends. It’s true that the reverse could hold, too. But who’s willing to take the chance that the Chinese would be as generous sharing any knowhow that could be used against it as the United States will be? And who seriously believes that a lobby-friendly Washington could exercise the kind of control over U.S. technologists that the dictators in Beijing will exercise over their Chinese counterparts – assuming that scientists and companies with long histories of enthusiastic voluntary tech transfer to China will end or even curb these activities outside this official dialogue setting?

And above and beyond these dual-use complications, the notion that the United States can successfully compartmentalize its China AI and broader tech policies so precisely and expertly seems bound to create a rerun of America’s approach to date. Even under the Trump administration, the diversity of interests and voices that inevitably shape decisions in a pluralistic, democratic U.S.-style political system kept blurring and otright undermining Washington’s focus. The product has long been much more incoherence and half-at-best-measures than either effective checks on China’s power or strong commitments to the kinds of government- and economy-wide tech promotion that’s rightly urged by this Commission – and by many others before it.

In other words, even years after China’s malign intentions became clear to a critical mass of American political and business leaders, they’ve continued to permit bilateral ties (in the Commission’s words) to be “complicated by [a] complex web of supply chains, research partnerships, and business relationships….” In turn, that’s the main reason why, to quote the report again, “The U.S. government is not prepared to defend the United States in the coming artificial intelligence (AI) era.”

In a previous post, I criticized the Biden administration for describing the U.S.-China relationship as a competition because the term is

“so intrinsically ambivalent (especially in the realm of world affairs) that its much likelier to confuse than to provide useful policy guidance. In addition, competition is a concept that evokes the playing field, where both victory and defeat have ultimately trivial consequences, rather than the fundamentally anarchic and much more dangerous international landscape. Consequently, its use tends to downplay even stakes otherwise defined more threateningly.”

This AI report greatly adds to the evidence that treating America’s dealings with China as a competition (including President Biden’s latest version: an “extreme competition”) can only lead Washington down a dangerous dead-end. It’s effectively contending that, even though China literally is seeking the United States’ defeat and domination, it’s still interested in helping Americans cure cancer or save the world from climate change, and that therefore current U.S. policy need only a large number essentially tweaks to keep safeguarding national security and prosperity adequately. And it assumes that American policymakers are skilled enough to achieve the needed “calibration” of rivalry and cooperation. (Watch this term turn into a favorite of U.S. officials and pundits – especially the globalists – going forward.)

I’m much more impressed with former boxing champion Mike Tyson’s observation that “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” In other words, what looks great on the drawing board – or on the word processor – tends to fall apart when it confronts reality.

The lesson to be learned isn’t that planning and strategizing isn’t necessary. Instead, it’s that particularly in high-stakes situations, the conceptually simplest plan will likely be the best. When it comes to the China challenge, including  artificial intelligence interactions between the two countries, that means spending much less time trying to thread needles, and more time figuring out how to shut down the transfer of superior U.S. knowhow to China as completely as possible.