Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The North Korea Credibility Gap at The Atlantic

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Cold War, deterrence, fact-checking, Kim Jong Un, Kori Schake, North Korea, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Peter Beinart, preventive war, The Atlantic, Trump, Uri friedman

The Atlantic has long been one of America’s most important magazines, so we all have a stake in doing what we can to keep its quality as high as possible. And it’s in that spirit, that I offer the magazine’s editors this advice: If you’re going to keep running pieces on the North Korea nuclear weapons crisis, make sure that your authors read your own previous coverage of the North Korea nuclear weapons crisis. That way, you’ll avoid embarrassments like that resulting from recent posts by contributing editors Peter Beinart and Kori Schake, and by staff writer Uri Friedman.

According to both Beinart and Schake, President Trump’s positions on North Korea depart dramatically from those of his predecessors. The main reason? He’s considering launching preventive strikes aimed at destroying North Korea’s nuclear arsenal before it can be used against America’s allies in Asia, or against the United States itself.

In Beinart’s words, Mr. Trump’s mulling of this action, which aims “not at stopping an imminent North Korean attack, but at stopping North Korea from gaining the means to launch such an attack” is “the equivalent of shooting a man because he’s on his way to the store to purchase a pistol or because he’s at a firing range checking to see if it works.”

As such, his stance is both “something that Americans once considered monstrous” and “barbaric,” as well as an option rejected by Cold War presidents “while Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong—two leaders every bit as brutal and rhetorically chilling as Kim Jong Un—developed nuclear weapons. Instead, America’s leaders responded with deterrence.”

As Schake puts it, Mr. Trump’s suggestions that preventive war is on the table as a U.S. option ignore the reality that “the constraint on Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama, is the same one he faces. That constraint is the 30 million South Koreans and 130,000 Americans living within artillery and rocket range of North Korea’s conventional forces. Trump’s predecessors weren’t being nice to Pyongyang; they were recognizing that the risks of preventative war to remove the North Korean threat aren’t worth starting a war that will inevitably incur ghastly damage.”

My point here isn’t to debate whether these assertions are true. It’s to point out that, just a few months before these pieces came out, folks who follow foreign policy closely may well have read the following statement in a major magazine: “Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all considered preemptive military strikes against North Korea’s nuclear sites….”

And where did this statement appear? In an article by Atlantic staff writer Friedman.

Friedman also made clear that all three former presidents rejected this option – although his account makes no mention of philosophical principles or a more narrowly based refusal to risk causing mass casualties in this particular instance.

He may be wrong, too. But don’t Beinart and Schake read Friedman? Doesn’t he read Beinart and Schake? Didn’t anyone on The Atlantic‘s staff notice the stark contradiction? Indeed, what happened to the magazine’s fact-checking operation? According to this article, it still existed as of 2012 – and was incredibly rigorous. Has it been phased out? Is it gone completely?

The Atlantic continues to publish enough valuable content that I’ll keep monitoring its website and reading many articles and posts. I’d recommend it to RealityChek readers and everyone else, too. But here’s something else I’d recommend – read these regulars, at least, with a little more than the usual healthy skepticism.

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Our So-Called Foreign Policy: So You Think Trump is a Dangerous Nut on North Korea?

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Alex Ward, alliances, allies, Ana Fifield, Ankit Panda, Associated Press, BBC, CNN, Cold War, Council on Foreign Relations, David J. Rothkopf, David Jackson, deterrence, Diane Feinstein, Ed Markey, foreign policy, foreign policy establishment, Kim Jong Un, media, Nicole Gaouette, North Korea, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Peter Baker, political class, Rick Gladstone, Stewart Patrick, The Atlantic, The Diplomat, The New York Times, Trump, United Nations, USAToday, Vox.com, Washington Post

Weird as it sounds, the North Korea nuclear crisis has created two significant benefits – though unfortunately neither has yet created either establishment or popular pressure to change an increasingly reckless American approach.

Still, it’s promising that dictator Kim Jong Un’s rapid development of nuclear weapons that can reach the U.S. homeland is not only revealing that America’s longstanding approach to defense alliances is now exposing the nation to the risk of nuclear attack even when its own security is not directly at stake. It’s also more recently begun exposing America’s many foreign policy and other elite mainstays either as ignoramuses or (much more likely) shameful hypocrites.

The reason? They profess to be shocked, just shocked (Google “Casablanca” and “Louis Renault”) that President Trump has threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea in order “to defend itself or its allies.” As if they’ve never heard of “nuclear deterrence.” And don’t know that such saber-rattling has been U.S. policy for decades.

To review briefly, since fairly early in the Cold War, and especially since the former Soviet Union developed its own impressive nuclear forces, American leaders have overwhelmingly concluded that the only reasonable uses of these weapons was preventing a nuclear attack on the United States itself, or a similar strike or conventional military assault on one of the countries it was treaty-bound to protect. The idea was that even nuclear-armed potential aggressors the Soviets and Chinese (and the North Koreans, once they crossed the threshhold) would think at least twice before moving on targets if they had reason to fear that the United States would launch its own nukes against those countries.

From time to time, some politicians and analysts suggested that the effects of such nuclear weapons use could be restricted to efforts to take out the enemy’s remaining nuclear weapons or otherwise fall short of “totally destroying” that adversary. But for the most part, the idea of limited nuclear war has been rejected in favor of vowing annihilation. And except for disarmament types on the Left and super-hawks on the Right (who supported the aforementioned “counterforce” approach), the political class comprised of office-holders and journalists and think tankers was just fine with the nuclear element of U.S. alliance strategy.

It’s completely bizarre, therefore, that almost none of the press coverage – including “experts'” analyses – of Mr. Trump’s September 19 statement evinces any awareness of any of this history. Instead, it’s portrayed the “totally destroy” threat as appallingly monstrous, unhinged rhetoric from an unprecedentedly erratic chief executive. Just as bad, President Trump is accused of playing right into Kim’s hands and shoring up his support with the North Korean populace.

For instance, here’s how Washington Post reporter Ana Fifield yesterday described the consensus of of North Korea specialists she had just surveyed:

“Kim Jong Un’s regime tells the North Korean people every day that the United States wants to destroy them and their country. Now, they will hear it from another source: the president of the United States himself.

“In his maiden address to the United Nations on Tuesday, President Trump threatened to “totally destroy North Korea.” Analysts noted that he did not even differentiate between the Kim regime, as President George W. Bush did with his infamous “axis of evil” speech, and the 25 million people of North Korea.”

Here’s the New York Times‘ take, from chief White House correspondent Peter Baker and foreign policy reporter Rick Gladstone:

“President Trump brought the same confrontational style of leadership he has used at home to the world’s most prominent stage on Tuesday as he vowed to ‘totally destroy North Korea‘ if it threatened the United States….”

Similarly, USAToday‘s David Jackson described the Trump speech as “a stark address to the United Nations that raised the specter of nuclear warfare” and contended that “Trump’s choice of words on North Korea is in keeping with the bellicose rhetoric he’s already used to describe the tensions that have escalated throughout his eight months in office.”

As for the Associated Press, the world’s most important news wire service, it was content to offer readers a stunning dose of moral equivalence: “In a region well used to Pyongyang’s pursuit of nuclear weapons generating a seemingly never-ending cycle of threats and counter-threats, Mr. Trump’s comments stood out.“

CNN‘s approach? It quoted a “senior UN diplomat” as claiming that “it was the first time in his memory that a world leader has called for the obliteration of another state at the UNGA [United Nations General Assembly], noting even Iran’s most fiery leaders didn’t similarly threaten Israel.”

For good measure, reporter Nicole Gaouette added, “The threat is likely to ratchet up tensions with North Korea while doing little to reassure US allies in Asia, said analysts who added that the President now also runs the risk of appearing weak if he doesn’t follow through.”

The Council on Foreign Relations’ Stewart Patrick, who served on the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff under former President George W. Bush, told the BBC that the Trump threat is implausible, and that “I think the folks in the Pentagon when they look at military options are just aghast at the potential loss of life that could occur with at a minimum hundreds of thousands of South Koreans killed in Seoul.”

For David J. Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official and protege of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger who went on to edit FOREIGNPOLICY magazine (where I worked many years before), the problem is much simpler: “The president of the United States chose, in a forum dedicated to diplomacy, to threaten to wipe another nation — a much smaller one — off the face of the earth in language that was not so much hard-line rhetoric as it was schoolboy bullying complete with childish name-calling.”

Many members of the U.S. Congress were no better. Said California Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein: “Trump’s bombastic threat to destroy North Korea and his refusal to present any positive pathways forward on the many global challenges we face are severe disappointments. He aims to unify the world through tactics of intimidation, but in reality he only further isolates the United States.”

Massachusetts Democratic Senator Ed Markey brought up a war powers angle: “The more the president talks about the total destruction of North Korea, the more it’s necessary for the country and the Congress to have a debate over what the authority of a president is to launch nuclear weapons against another country.”

What’s of course especially ironic about Markey’s words is that such a U.S. policy of “no first use” of nuclear weapons would effectively destroy the American alliances that liberals like Markey have become enamored with lately, and that President Trump is often charged by these same liberals as attempting to dismantle.

Some other news organizations and websites have behaved even more strangely – lambasting the Trump threat but then acknowledging deep inside their accounts that the President said nothing fundamentally new.

For example, the viscerally anti-Trump Vox.com website predictably led off one of its accounts with, “On September 19, President Donald Trump gave his first speech to the United Nations General Assembly. His harsh rhetoric toward North Korea stood out — mostly because he threatened to obliterate the country of 25.4 million people.”

Six paragraphs later, writer Alex Ward got around to mentioning that “A few [specialists] noted that it was similar to what other presidents, including President Obama, have said before.”

And in an Atlantic post titled, “A Presidential Misunderstanding of Deterrence,” author Ankit Panda of The Diplomat newspaper accused President Trump of using “apocalyptic rhetoric” and threatening “to commit a horrific act expressly forbidden by international humanitarian law….”

But then he immediately turned around and admitted,

“The remarks echoed similar, countless deterrent threats levied against North Korea by past U.S. presidents with more subtlety and innuendo, perhaps allowing for a more calibrated and flexible response. But ultimately vowing to ‘totally destroy’ North Korea if America or its allies come under attack is, in fact, not all that sharp a break from existing U.S. policy.”

If these treatments of the North Korea crisis were simply efforts to demonize President Trump by abusing history, that would be contemptible enough, but what else is new from America’s too often incompetent and scapegoat-addicted elites?

But something much more dangerous is at work here. Individuals who, for good reasons, have not been regarded as kooks are using Never Trump-ism to foster a genuinely kooky idea. They’re suggesting that the alliances so central to America’s foreign policy making for decades should be viewed as little more than kumbaya symbols, and that anyone speaking frankly about their possibly deadly and indeed horrific implications is beyond the pale – even though the proliferation of nuclear weapons has unmistakably rendered these arrangements far more perilous.

In other words, they’re spreading the worst, and most childish, of all canards about foreign policy, or about any dimension of public policy – not that a particular set of choices is sound or not (that’s almost always legitimately debatable), but that hard choices never need to be made at all.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Can North Korea Really be Deterred?

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alliances, allies, Berlin crises, China, Cold War, communism, cruise missiles, de-Stalinization, deterrence, Great Cultural Revolution, ICBM, Japan, Kim Jong Un, Nikita Khrushchev, North Korea, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, South Korea, Soviet Union, strategic bombers, USSR

North Korea has just thrown down a major gauntlet to President Trump, escalating the crisis caused by its nuclear weapons program by launching missiles that briefly overflew Japanese territory. This provocation of course follows Mr. Trump’s August 11 warning to the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, “If he does anything with respect to Guam or anyplace else that’s an American territory or an American ally, he will truly regret it and regret it fast.”

Since Japan is a U.S. treaty ally, Pyongyang’s newest missile action clearly crosses one of those red lines. And obviously it puts the onus on the President to either retaliate in some meaningful way – with all the possible risks to Asia and to American territory, including the risk of nuclear attack – or implicitly acknowledge that the credibility of U.S. defense commitments to Japan and South Korea has been severely compromised. That second development wouldn’t be risk free either, as it’s likely to increase pressure on those and other allies (or protectorates, a word more suitable for Japan) to strengthen their security by building their own nuclear weapons.

Although the American foreign policy establishment views that as a nightmare scenario, I disagree – and in fact have argued for pulling U.S. forces out of the area completely and letting Northeast Asia’s strong, wealthy countries (which include China and Russia) deal with North Korea however they see fit. As I’ve explained, that’s the best way to minimize the danger of a North Korean nuclear weapon taking out an American city, or two or three – which should be Washington’s overriding priority in a situation in which core U.S. security is not inherently threatened.

But rather than restate this argument, today I’d like to deal with one of the most serious claims made in favor of maintaining the American policy status quo on the Korean peninsula. It’s the contention that despite the North’s new, growing ability to hit the U.S. homeland with nuclear weapons, Washington should continue running this risk to defend its allies, help keep the peace in economically dynamic East Asia, and preserve America’s overall influence in the region because it’s dealt successfully with much greater nuclear threats before. As argued in this typical post, during the Cold War, the United States deterred aggression from the Soviet Union and China even though they (and especially the USSR) long had vastly larger and more sophisticated nuclear forces than North Korea either has today or will have for the foreseeable future.

There’s a seemingly obvious retort: Kim Jong Un is literally nuts and the Soviet and Chinese Cold War leaders weren’t. But I don’t buy this point for two reasons. First, for all his apparent erratic-ness, no one can confidently assess the North Korean leader’s mental state. And it’s entirely possible for individuals to me hot-headed and megalomaniacal without being suicidal – which Kim would have to be by definition if he thought that even in the worst case for the United States (some of his missiles land on American territory after whatever sequence of events triggers this catastrophe), Washington wouldn’t retaliate by rendering North Korea practically uninhabitable.

Second, not only did the Cold War witness terrifying moments arguably due to reckless behavior from the Communist world (like the 1958-61 Berlin crises). It also featured lots of bombastic rhetoric from Moscow and Beijing (like “We will bury you” — a boast from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that may or may not have deserved to be taken at face value). In fact, Khrushchev’s “shoe-banging” at the United Nations — another episode surrounded by some uncertainty nowadays — suggested to many Americans at the time that the Soviet leader was unstable, and the Great Cultural Revolution convinced much of the world that the Chinese leadership collectively had gone off its rocker.

But I do think that Kim Jong Un is different, and more dangerous, for several reasons. For all the saber-rattling even during the Cold War’s most dangerous days, from the mid-1950s on, when the Soviet Union had developed intercontinental nuclear striking power, the two superpowers had also established an impressive record of working together to defuse tensions and even solve problems in several key areas.

Not only did Soviet leaders change their rhetorical tune almost immediately following Stalin’s death in 1953, but cease-fires were negotiated in the East-West proxy wars in Korea itself along with Indochina, the two superpowers also and Washington and Moscow agreed to eliminate an important central European bone of contention by agreeing on neutral status for Austria. This anthology contains a good summary. In addition, Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization program entailed a series of liberalizing economic and even political reforms, however unsuccessful or inadequate most clearly were.

So although the Soviets never stopped probing and seeking advantage – sometimes, as in Berlin, to the point of challenging major declared Western interests – by the end of the 1950s, American leaders had ample reason to conclude that other impulses were also at work that were more reasonable and more compatible with an acceptable version of “peaceful coexistence.” It’s true that domestic Soviet reforms were abruptly halted and in some instances reversed following Khrushchev’s ouster. But in an apparent paradox, Moscow’s foreign policy began displaying more caution, too – and in fact, prompted angry accusations from China that Soviet “revisionists” had betrayed Communism’s revolutionary heritage and ambitions.

As indicated above, China’s foreign policy rhetoric and domestic behavior displayed no shortage of Kim Jong Un-like characteristics during the 1960s. But the argument that the United States successfully deterred this Communist power as well suffers a fatal flaw: Beijing wasn’t able even to reach the United States with a missile of any kind until 1981. Its power to use long-range bombers to deliver nuclear-armed cruise missiles to U.S. targets only dates back to the 1990s at the earliest. And of course, by the first of those dates, China had entered into a quasi-alliance with the United States against the Soviet Union, and by the second, it was well into one of history’s great market-oriented economic development drives, and was rapidly expanding its economic ties with the United States.

By contrast, North Korea can nuke American targets now, has shown its neighbors (especially South Korea) the most belligerent possible face on an almost nonstop basis, and Kim Jong Un has displayed absolutely no interest in the kind of meaningful domestic reform that would indicate he values preventing his country’s near or utter destruction over dreams of conquest.

I’m certainly not ruling out some kind of negotiated solution to the North Korea nuclear crisis – at some point. But because we know so little about Kim and his regime, and because it’s behaved so aggressively for so long, I remain convinced that it would be nothing less than deranged for the United States to keep its forces so directly in harm’s way in Asia, and thus run a growing risk of nuclear attack, on the mere hope that he either can be deterred in ways that worked in the past in dramatically different circumstances, or that he eventually comes to his senses

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: So JFK on Cuba Should be Trump’s North Korea Model?

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Bay of Pigs, Cold War, Cuba, Cuban Missile Crisis, Fidel Castro, John F. Kennedy, Kim Jong Un, Michael Dobbs, Nikita Khrushchev, North Korea, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Robert E. Kelly, Soviet Union, The National Interest, Trump, Turkey, Vienna summit

The race for this year’s foreign policy chutzpah award couldn’t be tighter. Just when I thought political scientist Robert E. Kelly had grabbed an insurmountable lead with his new National Interest article downplaying the horror of a possible North Korean nuclear strike on the United States, along came Michael Dobbs with a jaw-dropping venture into fake history-land masquerading as an op-ed in yesterday’s Washington Post.

Dobbs’ achievement? An article comparing President Trump’s performance in the North Korea crisis so far with former President John F. Kennedy’s in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis that failed to mention either the April, 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion: the June, 1961 U.S.-Soviet summit in Vienna: or the way in which the October, 1962 U.S.-Soviet showdown in the Caribbean actually ended.

According to Dobbs, a former Post correspondent turned historian (chiefly of the Cuban crisis), Kennedy was a model of reasonableness and restraint whose unique, “overarching sense of history” led him “to consider the interests of future generations of Americans, and ultimately all of humanity” and thus deserves much credit for preventing the showdown from turning into an apocalyptic nuclear war.

As Dobbs put it (employing terminology used in a contemporary letter from Kennedy’s wife, Jackie), the former president acted like a “big man” who knows “the needs for self-control and restraint.” Mr. Trump, however, has “indulgently” decided to “play chicken” and respond in kind to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un’s “explosive rhetoric” – a dangerous effort to “out-crazy” Pyongyang that reflects a “little man” outlook “moved more by fear and pride.”

But the Bay of Pigs invasion is kind of important because Kennedy’s support for this disastrously failed attempt by CIA-supported Cuban exiles to overthrow Fidel Castro persuaded Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to reach a secret deal with Havana to deploy medium-range missiles in Cuba in the first place – in part to deter another attack either by Cubans or by the United States. So the former President’s actions (which, to be sure, continued a policy of his predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower) were largely responsible for creating the Soviet gambit in the first place.

Just as bad, as Kennedy admitted, his failure to order nearby American forces to come to the overwhelmed exile army’s rescue “no doubt” convinced “his superpower rival…that ‘I’m inexperienced. Probably thinks I’m stupid. Maybe most important, he thinks that I had no guts.'” The source for this passage? Dobbs’ own missile crisis history.

Has President Trump approved any similarly reckless blunders that sent such dangerous messages? No.

The Vienna conference is kind of important because this first meeting between the American and Soviet leaders reinforced Khrushchev’s impression of his Cold War counterpart as a weakling. According to one account of the summit and its aftermath:

“‘Roughest thing in my life,’ Kennedy had told James Reston of The New York Times, after it was all over. ‘He just beat the hell out of me.’ Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was contemptuous of his boss’s performance. ‘Khrushchev scared the poor little fellow dead,’ he told his cronies. British prime minister Harold Macmillan, who met with Kennedy shortly after he left Vienna, was only slightly more sympathetic. He thought that the president had been ‘completely overwhelmed by the ruthlessness and barbarity of the Russian Chairman.'”

The source for this passage? That same Dobbs missile crisis history.

Have any of President Trump’s exercise in personal diplomacy failed so utterly? No.

Finally, the Cuban crisis’ resolution is kind of important because Kennedy had a relatively easy out: an offer to remove U.S. missiles stationed in neighboring Turkey that Moscow (understandably) viewed as too close for comfort. This central element of crisis-ending deal struck by Kennedy and Khrushchev was kept secret (at Washington’s insistence), but it’s importance is now recognized by the historical community – including Dobbs.

Does President Trump have a comparable option? Evidently not – unless you count my proposal to pull American troops out of South Korea, which would remove any remotely plausible reason for North Korea to threaten U.S. territory, and turn the problem of handling North Korea’s nuclear forces over to its powerful and wealthy neighbors. Yet no American political leaders on any point on the political spectrum have expressed any support.

Dobbs of course has every right to idolize Kennedy and slight Trump. What he has no right to do after this piece of propaganda is to present himself as anything but a hack.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Uses and Mis-Uses of Thucydides

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balance of power, China, Destined for War, East Asia, foreign policy, geopolitics, globalism, Graham Allison, international order, internationalism, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, realism, strategy, The History of the Peloponnesian Wae, Thucydides, Thucydides Trap

It’s always great to learn that U.S. leaders are working hard to use history to inform their policy decisions – unless they’re completely misreading the relevance of lessons of the past to America’s current circumstances, as could well be the case with senior Trump administration officials and their fascination with Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War.

Don’t get me wrong: This chronicle of conflicts between ancient Athens and Sparta is a genuine classic both of military history and international relations theory. I hold it in particularly high regard because it contains a seminal argument for viewing the latter through a “realist” lens, emphasizing that countries act, in the words of one recent description, “out of pragmatic self-interest, with little regard for ideology, values or morality.”

But according to an account that came out last week (and that hasn’t been denied), top Trump foreign policy and national security aides are viewing Thucydides as a valuable guide to answering the question of whether war between the United States and China is inevitable. And their interest in the History has been encouraged by the work of a leading modern scholar, Harvard University’s Graham Allison. Allison has applied what’s widely regarded as Thucydides’ main conclusion – that established powers find it intrinsically and understandably difficult to deal with rising powers peacefully – to the U.S.-China situation, and in the process, he’s drawn a lot of attention in Beijing as well as Washington.

But there’s a major problem with focusing on whether the United States and China are stuck in a “Thucydides Trap” that makes war just about inevitable (Allison is not nearly so pessimistic), and examining past international rivalries for insights (his major contribution to the debate). As with so many mainstream analyses of American foreign policy for decades, Allison – and the Trump-ers apparently paying him heed – have completely forgotten the distinctive geopolitical and economic advantages the United States brings to international relations.

As I’ve written previously, the United States enjoys the kind of geographic isolation, military power, and capacity for economic self-sufficiency that enables it to view most overseas developments with relative indifference – provided that it maintains these strengths. And for all the important nuance he brings to his treatment of U.S.-China relations, it’s clear that Allison has overlooked what’s genuinely special about the American position, too.

Although I haven’t read Allison’s full Thucydides Trap book yet, I have read this lengthy magazine version. And it shows unmistakably that his warning that “Based on the current trajectory, war between the United States and China in the decades ahead is not just possible, but much more likely than recognized at the moment” accepts the same longstanding American globalist assumptions that have led to so many costly U.S. foreign policy mistakes since the end of World War II.

For example, Allison has a great deal to teach if it’s true that the United States has an intrinsic need to worry greatly about developments or questions like

>”a rising power…threatening to displace a ruling power”:

>”a rapid shift in the balance of power between two rivals”:

>”the rising power’s growing entitlement, sense of its importance, and demand for greater say and sway”;

>the fact that “Never before in history has a nation risen so far, so fast, on so many dimensions of power”:

>whether China is “restored to its rightful place, where its power commands recognition of and respect for China’s core interests”;

>whether “the growing trend toward a multipolar [as opposed to a U.S.-led] world will not change”;

But nowhere has he made this case for these concerns. Indeed, by and large, like other mainstream analysts and leaders, he simply assumes their crucial importance, without explaining how they could affect the nation’s safety, independence, and well-being directly and decisively.

Allison (along with the rest of the foreign policy mainstream, whose dominance is as complete on the conventional American Left as on the Right) gets more specific, and his analysis becomes more useful, when he raises questions like: ”Could China become #1? In what year could China overtake the United States to become, say, the largest economy in the world, or primary engine of global growth, or biggest market for luxury goods?”

And he identifies and expresses even more concrete core mainstream worries:

>First, whether China’s “current leaders [are] serious about displacing the U.S. as the predominant power in Asia?”’

>Second, both more broadly and more centrally “the impact that China’s ascendance will have on the U.S.-led international order, which has provided unprecedented great-power peace and prosperity for the past 70 years.”

But like the first set of worries, even these concerns should be treated as first-order issues by Americans only if they assume that, as with much less secure and inherently wealthy powers, either their security, prosperity, and independence are crucially reliant on the international environment, or that these aims are much more safely and efficiently achieved through international activism than through enhancing their abilities to deal with challenges and withstand crises acceptably in a turbulent international environment.

If the long-held globalist views stressing America’s relative vulnerability or dependence are accepted, then all of Allison’s questions remain vital – from the least tangible (like whether China wins more influence overall) to the most (whether China wants to replace the United States as Asia’s kingpin). And the fate of that “U.S.-led international order” (including preserving American primacy in Asia) ultimately matters most of all because it’s seen to be the only acceptable or only feasible guarantor of a satisfactory national future.

If, however, that assumption about the present international order is fatally flawed, then even subjects like the relative overall balance of power between the United States and China become secondary. They would logically cede pride of place to the issue of whether America’s power (in any dimension) is adequate to achieve specific national objectives or maintain valued national advantages. For even though relative power will of course influence success or failure, in the final analysis, the decisive consideration is whether that power is sufficient to achieve those particular successes and maintain those particular advantages, not whether America in some general sense “matches up” with other countries.

As always with these posts on overall foreign policy strategy, the main takeaway here isn’t that Allison and the other globalists are wrong and that I’m right. The main point is that the globalist school has – wittingly or not – long not only opposed, but defined out of existence, alternative approaches to security and prosperity that dovetail well with many of the nation’s most conspicuous strengths.

Here’s another way to put it: In his article, Allison expressly states that his detailed look at “16 cases over the last 500 years in which there was a rapid shift in the relative power of a rising nation that threatened to displace a ruling state….” But all entailed “the struggle for mastery in Europe and Asia over the past half millennium….” When globalists like him can explain why the geopolitical and economic similarities between the United States and these historic powers – or between ancient Athens and Sparta – count much more than the differences, they’ll be entitled to claim victory in their on-again-off-again debate with those favoring less ambitious over America’s foreign policy strategy. Until then, however, their opponents will be entitled to claim that they’ve managed to avoid the biggest questions.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: At the WTO, Europe Claims a Right to Free Ride

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Airbus, alliances, Boeing, Charles Dickens, Defense Department, EU, European Union, foreign policy establishment, free-riding, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, subsidies, Trade, trade law, Trump, World Trade Organization, WTO

Charles Dickens famously observed that the law can be an idiot. Last week’s World Trade Organization (WTO) ruling on U.S. and European Union (EU) aerospace subsidies reminds that American alliance policy can be idiotic – and in a key respect has been for decades. The fault here lies not with the WTO – which is hardly beyond criticism. Instead, the problem entails an American approach to international security relationships that continues a decades-long record of enabling brazen free-riding even under the current U.S. administration – which so far has decried this practice only rhetorically.

Interestingly, the WTO decision last Friday looks like a big win for American aerospace giant Boeing and a big loss for its EU rival Airbus. The trade body ruled as still illegal only one of the original 28 subsidies provided Boeing by Washington state and the federal government that were challenged by Airbus. According to Airbus, the WTO agreed with its allegation that some of the other 27 means of Boeing support were subsidies, but Boeing says that since the ruling determined that these payments had not harmed Airbus, they can remain in place. Airbus disagrees, so expect more litigation.

But here’s what’s completely outrageous. Some of the subsidies Airbus successfully challenged – at least on paper so far – were U.S. Defense Department subsidies. It’s jaw-dropping enough to recognize that Airbus gets military support, too. What’s worse is that so much of the Pentagon money handed over to Boeing (and other defense contractors) has been spent on weapons and other military systems that the United States would not need at all or in such quantity either if Washington hadn’t taken on any role in protecting Europe for decades, or if the Europeans bore anything like an appropriate burden for the own defense.

And don’t forget: For decades, even most U.S. Presidents and other foreign policy establishmentarians who have assign supreme value to continuing current transatlantic security arrangements agree that too many European members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have been shirking. Talk about biting the hand that shields you.

It’s important, however, to keep in mind who’s mainly to blame. It’s clear that the Europeans deserve no high marks for either gratitude or loyalty. But it’s also clear that their actions can be reasonably portrayed as legitimate efforts to maximize their own self interests – reflecting the equally reasonable judgment that these gambits long have been good bets to succeed.

What the American public needs to ask is (a) why their leaders have handled alliance relationships so ineptly as to have created expectations of free-riding that the WTO case shows are now seen as nothing less than a right to free-ride; and (b) whether the avowedly transactional Trump administration will view the EU defense subsidy charges as a long overdue opportunity to say enough’s enough.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Why Establishment Thinking About Containing China Remains Far from Serious

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allies, American Enterprise Institute, Asia, burden sharing, China, Daniel Blumenthal, defense budget, East Asia, entitlements, foreign policy establishment, free-riding, Japan, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, RealClearPolitics.com, South Korea, taxes, tech transfer, Trade

Congratulations to the American Enterprise Institute’s Daniel Blumenthal for coming up with some genuinely new insights into the U.S.-China balance of power and especially its relationship with the evolving economies of the two countries. Unfortunately, Blumenthal’s new essay for RealClearPolitics.com also shows that gaping blind spots remain in establishment thinking about the China challenge its members claim to be analyzing seriously.

For the purposes of this post, let’s grant Blumenthal’s mainstream assumption that it matters greatly to the United States which great power dominates East Asia politically. I disagree, but the point here is that if America does want to fend off a China challenge, greater policy changes will be needed than Blumenthal and other conventional wisdom-mongers seem ready to contemplate.

The author’s main theme is that the United States has no legitimate reason to doubt its economic capacity to prevent China from becoming Asia’s kingpin, and his new wrinkle involves measuring economic power by looking more at national wealth, and less at national economic growth. Since the U.S. wealth levels are both much greater than China’s, and since the gap has just resumed growing according to statistics he cites, America can easily afford the military forces needed to put China back in its place. And he blames China’s recent and impressive catch-up on this score on Americans’ recent (Blumenthal doesn’t specify the time frame) political decision to skimp on military spending while continue to devote exorbitant sums to entitlement spending – which has indeed long dominated the budget outlays (along with, as he’s noted, interest payments on the resulting ballooning national debt).

According to Blumenthal, Americans and their leaders as a result have chosen to elevate “the intergenerational transfer of wealth” over national security. Strictly speaking, he’s right. But other interpretations of national priorities seem just as legitimate.

For example, as the author briefly notes, the U.S. population is aging. So a major national retirement funding challenge will face even the most defense-minded politicians. That doesn’t let American leaders or the recipients of these entitlements off the hook in terms of making sacrifices needed to safeguard national security. But it’s bound to raise the question of whether the burden of sacrifice should be limited to middle class Americans. The great increase in national wealth mentioned by Blumenthal makes clear that the nation has many other resources on which it can draw to fund a bigger military – especially since the private economy’s wealth has led the surge. In other words, why not tax the rich or corporations more heavily to pay for new personnel and weapons?

One obvious rejoinder is that modest levels of taxes on wealthy Americans and on American companies are needed to ensure the economic growth needed to keep national wealth levels robust. But even accepting the doctrinaire trickle-down economics underlying this assumption, should upper-level individual incomes and business profits be completely exempted from any responsibility to pay for the military? If so, why? And wouldn’t that policy greatly loosen the relationship between national wealth and military capability emphasized by Blumenthal?

The author also neglects another big pool of resources that can be brought to bear on countering China: the wealth of America’s regional allies. Stunningly, after decades of American pleading for greater burden-sharing, countries with a far greater stake than the United States in resisting Chinese regional domination continue free-riding on U.S. defense guarantees. Why should American entitlements recipients see any reduction in benefits before Japanese and South Koreans pay at least as much for their own security (relatively speaking) as the much more geographically distant United States does? And their contributions could be immense. Japan alone, for example, is the world’s third largest national economy (behind the United States and China, respectively). 

Finally, as with nearly all the rest of the establishment, Blumenthal completely neglects the opposite side of the U.S.-China defense resources equation: The decisive extent to which American economic policy continues enriching China, and therefore continuing to enable it to afford lots of both “guns and butter” (as economists and political scientists have dubbed military and social spending). Thanks in part to literally trillions of dollars of earnings from the trade surpluses it’s long run with the United States, the Chinese pie keeps expanding strongly (that’s the economic growth whose importance Blumenthal softpedals). As a result, more new resources are generated for whatever priorities or combination of priorities the Chinese government chooses.

Even worse, as I’ve long noted, recklessly lax tech transfer policies on America’s part have for decades given the Chinese much of the knowhow needed to turn out increasingly advanced weapons and other military systems. Some signs of official concerns about this outflow have appeared in Washington lately, but U.S. leaders (and the rest of the establishment) remain woefully behind the curve.

When America’s East Asia security strategy stops bolstering the Chinese threat it depicts as such a huge concern, when it insists that local countries act like they have at least as great a stake in remaining independent of China as does the United States, when the wealthiest Americans are required to devote more of their recent immense windfalls to the common defense, and if all of those changes still leave China closing fast on the combined forces of the United States and its neighbors, it would become legitimate to ask Main Street Americans to start shouldering greater burdens. Until then, the U.S. working and middle classes will be entirely justified in demanding that the nation’s Asia strategy pass a minimal seriousness test first.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: A Non-Hysterical View of Trump’s Syria Strikes

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air strikes, America First, Bashir Al-Assad, chemical weapons, China, Middle East, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, summit, Syria, Trump, Vladimir Putin, Xi JInPing

I love the idea of the “procustean bed.” It’s a phrase inspired by Greek mythology that’s come to describe the deceptive practice of depicting every notable event or feature of reality as fitting into a preconceived view of how the world works. It’s become standard operating procedure in our highly balkanized, increasingly fact-challenged, and ever more hysteria-prone political culture, and it nicely explains most of the commentary and analysis that’s followed President Trump’s decision to attack a Syrian air base following chemical weapons use in that country’s tragic civil conflict.

I have absolutely no inside information here, but strongly believe that the likeliest explanation is one that can’t easily be spun to advance any particular agenda, and that focuses on a crucial variable bound to be neglected when the main objective is political.

Not that I’m ruling out any of the sets of talking points being pushed so aggressively by the nation’s chattering class. It’s entirely possible that the Syria decision shows that the president never intended to carry out the kind of broadly stand-aside foreign policy he most often (but not always) touted during his campaign, and that he has cynically betrayed his core, non-interventionist, voters. Or that he simply has a learning curve and is wisely admitting that the dangerous world he’s operating in doesn’t permit an America First approach to be carried out safely.

The Syria strikes could reveal how fundamentally incoherent his worldview and agenda are – and are likely to remain. Or how pragmatic he has become. Or how emotionally and thoughtlessly he reacts to perceived challenge or betrayal (specifically, by a client state of a Russian government he’s supposedly coddled until now). Or how cunningly he’s decided to undercut charges that he’s a puppet of Moscow’s. Or, given Mr. Trump’s utter unpredictability on so many fronts, the Syria attacks could simply underscore how he continues to be just as utterly unpredictable in the Oval Office as he was on the campaign trail – which could mean that the Trump move means absolutely nothing at all.

But although all these takes on Syria could in theory be true, I doubt their veracity mainly because they pay absolutely no attention to considerations that would weigh heavily on the mind of even the least competent chief executive (or presidential aides) – the international circumstances staring him in the face once the chemical weapons news came through.

That’s why there’s such a strong case for the following as the prime determinants of the Trump decision – and as reasons for interpreting its long-term effects with extreme caution. Specifically, when the president ordered the strikes, he was in the middle of a summit with the leader of a foreign power – China – that had rapidly emerged as America’s foremost economic challengers and as at least a potential strategic rival. The day before the summit with Xi Jinping began, North Korea conducted the latest of a series of ballistic missile tests it’s conducted since President Trump’s inauguration, and in defiance of multiple United Nations resolutions. And the day before that came the chemical weapons attack – which itself preceded a meeting in Washington, D.C. between Mr. Trump and King Abdullah of Jordan.

So during a week when the global spotlight shone on President Trump with unprecedented intensity came two apparent provocations. (I’m purposely leaving open the possibility that Syrian dictator Bashir Al-Assad is not to blame for the chemical weapons bombing, though I believe the evidence – particularly the reported flights of fixed-wing aircraft over the site – point to Syria’s guilt.) Further, both provocations came very early during the first Trump term – a period when foreign leaders would naturally feel strongly tempted to test a new president, and when all countries would view him with great uncertainty even were he a more conventional politician.

In my view, all these circumstances combined to convince the president that a forceful response of some kind was needed. And since North Korea can credibly threaten American allies with conventional military and even nuclear attacks, and Syria can’t, Assad was the inevitable target.

In other words, the Trump strikes right now are best seen as a simple message-sending exercise. And the messages itself were simple as well. Not that, “I’ve changed my foreign policy stripes” and not that “I’m ready to plunge much more deeply into the Syria and other Middle East conflicts” but that “I have my limits” and “I have no intrinsic qualms about using the vast military arsenal at my disposal.”

Because the extreme shortage of competent policy analysts with a Trump-ian worldview has left the president little choice but to rely heavily on conventional thinkers for briefings and advice on foreign policy and other matters, it’s entirely possible that his air strikes presage a more activist Middle East or overall international strategy. At the same time, nothing about the strikes makes such a transformation inevitable, and especially far-fetched (as they always have been) are claims that individual uses of military power are pointless (at best) unless carried out as part of a broader plan of action meant to win or acceptably resolve a foreign conflict.

Particularly in the case of the Middle East, where history and recent American experience clearly teach that no constructive solutions are possible (or at least not at acceptable cost and risk), and where due to developments such as the U.S. domestic energy production revolution, the national interests at stake are no longer unquestionably vital, individual military actions that send uncomplicated messages can have significant value in their own right – and all the more so as they inevitably will be heard in many other regions, including those that matter more.

So everyone is best advised to hold their horses as they go about interpreting the Trump Syria strikes and especially about what futures they supposedly guarantee and rule out. Indeed, no one should heed this kind of advice more closely than President Trump.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Establishment’s Hypocritical China Cassandras

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allies, cabinet, China, confirmation hearings, East Asia, island building, national security, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Rex Tillerson, Secretary of State, South China Sea, tech transfer, Trade, Trump

Since Donald Trump’s cabinet choices appeared at their Senate confirmation hearings last week, critics have rightly observed that the president-elect and his picks to run his foreign and national security policies seem to disagree sharply on some major issues.

Less noticed is how the Trump nominees’ statements have revealed worse incoherence in the ranks of most critics – who sit overwhelmingly in the nation’s bipartisan foreign policy establishment. An unusually worrisome example has been the near-firestorm over Secretary of State-designate Rex Tillerson’s statement that “We’re going to have to send China a clear signal that, first, the island-building stops, and second, your access to those islands also is not going to be allowed.”

Tillerson’s remarks referred to an especially brazen aspect of Beijing’s expansionism in the South China Sea – centered on territorial claims that no one else in the region accepts. In an apparent effort to create irreversible realities “on the ground,” China has been capitalizing on the local topography literally to turn existing rocks and similar features into mini islands. Beijing has gone on to place various kinds of facilities – including some with military capabilities – on them, and to declare the immediately surrounding waters to be Chinese territory.

As widely noted, there’s at best considerable tension between Tillerson’s warning and several suggestions made by the president-elect during the campaign that he’s worried that America’s security relationships in the East Asia/Pacific region have become too dangerous militarily (since its adversaries are developing increasingly potent nuclear forces) and too one-sided economically (since the United States runs huge trade deficits with most regional countries).

Also completely weird, however, have been the alarm bells set off in establishment ranks to the effect that Tillerson had suddenly moved America dramatically closer to war with China over the South China Sea. For many of these voices have thoroughly upbraided Mr. Trump for failing to appreciate the crucial importance of U.S. alliances for safeguarding American and global security.

Establishment voice FOREIGN POLICY magazine ran a piece ominously asking, “Is Tillerson Ready to Go to War Over the South China Sea?” Only slightly less melodramatic was this Wall Street Journal sub-headline: “If carried out, Tillerson’s proposal to bar Beijing from some South China Sea islands would likely trigger military battle, experts say.”

A Christian Science Monitor headline sounded a similar alarm, and its article reported that “[T]he policy would dramatically reshape US thinking on Chinese expansionism, drawing a hard new territorial line in China’s backyard and, experts say, invite a military confrontation with Beijing.”

And even though they weren’t predicting imminent conflict, the experts interviewed by The Los Angeles Times still apparently fretted that Tillerson, “without diplomatic experience, had engaged in a flight of hyperbole in keeping with the tough rhetoric about China favored by Trump.”

These would all be defensible views except for one consideration: The American security strategy in the East Asia/Pacific region that all these experts have endorsed as a group for decades depends first and foremost on a credible threat to use military force to deter the kind of aggression in which China is engaged.

It is completely legitimate to question whether or not China’s island-building is the best casus belli, or circumstance for drawing a “red line.” But it is the height of hypocrisy to condemn – or even tut-tut over – a statement emphasizing that the United States has long considered maintaining freedom of the seas in East Asia to be a vital security interest (including by the Obama administration), and that China is on a course that will require U.S. military responses unless Beijing stops or changes direction sharply.

Or are all these American Asia experts confident that China will even slow its land and sea grab at some point down the road without firmer U.S. counter-moves than have been seen to date? If so, it’s time that they explained their reasons why – and how these rationales relate to their long-time insistence that major American military deployments in this region are essential to maintain peace and stability.

So the incoming administration looks to be a house divided on dealing with China’s strategic ambitions in Asia. That’s disturbing, but at least from the little known so far, the leading factions will be internally consistent (though the hawks still need to show that they understand the need to stop adding to China’s wealth and power through dangerously shortsighted trade and tech transfer policies, and Mr. Trump needs to understand more completely that even greater defense burden-sharing by the Asians could still leave America with unacceptable nuclear risks).

But the outside critics have just about disqualified themselves from any role in this debate – unless they can offer something more than hopelessly scattershot whining.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Sense and Nonsense on Russia’s Hacking

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2016 election, Amy Klochubar, China, cyber-security, cyber-war, defense spending, Democrats, hacking, Hillary Clinton, intelligence, John McCain, Middle East, NATO, Obama, Office of Personnel Management, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Putin, Republicans, Russia, sanctions, terrorism, Trump

What could be more predictable? The growing uproar over charges that Russia’s government waged a cyber-focused disinformation campaign to influence the last U.S. presidential election has let loose a flood of positively inane statements and arguments on both sides that show politics at its absolute worst.

Even worse, unless both Democrats and Republicans – and the various conflicting camps within the two major parties – get their act together quickly, the odds of further attacks and all the damage they can cause to American governance will only keep shooting up.

Let’s start with those who have expressed skepticism about these allegations, including regarding the substance of yesterday’s intelligence community report concluding that “President Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine confidence in the democratic process, denigrate [former] Secretary [of State Hillary] Clinton [the Democratic nominee], and harm her electability and potential presidency.”

Can they really be serious in contending that the intelligence agencies’ publicly expressed judgments don’t pass the credibility test because no smoking gun or any other compelling evidence has been published? Do they really want the CIA etc to reveal whatever human and technical sources and methods they rely on? Do they really believe that any effective counter-hacking strategy can be developed or continued after disclosing that information?

The insistence on definitive proof, moreover, amounts to terrible advice for making foreign and national security policy generally. It seeks to apply to the jungle realm of international affairs the standards of the American legal system. President Obama’s years in office should have taught Americans how dangerously childish it is to believe that relations among sovereign countries are governed by commonly agreed on rules and norms, that the world is on the verge of this beatific state of affairs, or even that significant progress is being made. And Americans should hold shadowy world of spying and counter-spying to a simon-pure standard?

A more defensible rationale for doubting the intelligence community’s work emphasizes its past major blunders. And from what’s been made public, they have indeed been all too common and all too troubling.  (Please keep in mind, though, that successes often cannot be made public.)

Nevertheless, if a president or president-elect has no faith in a high confidence judgment of this importance from his intelligence agencies, then it’s clearly time to clean house. If the next administration does indeed decisively reject the community’s work on this matter, it will have no legitimate choice but to replace it leaders.

Back to the genuinely ditzy positions: statements that the Russian hacking failed to influence the course of the election. I personally believe this, and shame on those partisans who keep insisting that this interference prevented former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from winning the White House or that it delegitimizes to any extent Donald Trump’s victory.

But should the United States count on Moscow – or any other actor – continuing to fail? Should it wait to respond forcefully until a U.S. adversary succeeds? Shouldn’t Washington capitalize on its adversaries’ current evident shortcomings in this regard and focus on punishment and deterrence? Simply posing these questions should make clear how obvious the answers are.

A final major objection to hammering the Russians represents another more reasonable judgment call, but it’s still fatally flawed. It’s the argument that Washington needs to softpedal the hack attack because the United States has a vital interest in improving relations with Moscow.

As I’ve written, opportunities for better ties with Russia abound, and they should be pursued. But that’s no reason to let Moscow off lightly for its cyber-aggression. In the first place, in any mutually beneficial relationship, boundaries need to be drawn. This is especially true given how much stronger and wealthier than Russia the United States is. If an effort to subvert America’s democratic processes doesn’t qualify, count on further, even worse provocations by Moscow.

Just as important, this approach overlooks a crucial reality: Clear indications that Russia has an incentive to cooperate with the United States in fighting Islamic extremism and terrorism haven’t appeared because Moscow is in a charitable, or even helpful, mood. They’ve appeared because these are vital interests as well for Russia, which both borders the dysfunctional Middle East and rules over its own Muslim populations.

In other words, Moscow has plenty of incentive to play ball with Washington on the Middle East whether the United States retaliates sharply for the hacking or not. And if the Russians don’t understand that, then there’s little hope of any form of meaningful cooperation.

Yet the actual and potential inconsistencies and hypocrisies of those urging tough retaliatory measures are equally troubling. Some are exclusive to Democrats. For example, the sanctions imposed on Moscow by the Obama administration for the hacking seem pretty modest for actions that it claims “demonstrated a significant escalation” of Russia’s “longstanding” efforts “to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order.”

And at the same time, the outrage voiced at Moscow contrasts conspicuously with reactions to China’s successful attack on the federal Office of Personnel Management, in which the records of some 22 million U.S. government employees – including classified and confidential information – were compromised. Indeed, President Obama never publicly blamed China’s government nor announced any responses.

Most important, however, is the question of whether Russia hardliners in both major parties old and new will act on the logical implications of their views of Russian actions and intentions – including on Moscow’s efforts to expand its influence along its own European borders. If for instance the hacking, as per Arizona Republican Senator John McCain, is truly an “act of war,” then will the call go out to cut off economic and diplomatic relations with Moscow?

If Russia’s moves against Crimea or Ukraine or the Baltics mean, in the words of Minnesota liberal Democratic Senator Amy Klochubar, that “Our commitment to NATO is more important than ever,” will today’s hawks – especially the noveau liberal variety – call for more U.S. defense spending and bigger American military deployments in endangered countries? And will they demand that American treaty allies in Europe finally get serious collectively about contributing to the common defense – which is first and foremost their own defense?

The answers to these questions will speak volumes to the American people as to whether their government is truly determined to defend interests declared to be major against foreign threats. And you can be sure they’ll convey the same vital information to America’s foreign friends and foes, too.