Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Evidence that the Multinationals Really Did Sell the U.S. Out to China

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capital spending, chemicals, China, computers, electronics, health security, healthcare goods, information technology, investment, Lenin, manufacturing, multinational companies, national security, offshoring, offshoring lobby, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, pharmaceuticals, research and development, supply chains, tech, tech transfer, U.S-China Economic and Security Review Commission, USCC, World Trade Organization, WTO

RealityChek readers and anyone who’s familiar with my work over many years know that I’ve often lambasted U.S. multinational companies for powerfully aiding and abetting China’s rise to the status of economic great power status – and of surging threat to U.S. national security and prosperity. In fact, the dangers posed by China’s activities and goals have become so obvious that even the American political and policy establishments that on the whole actively supported the policies – and that permitted money from this corporate Offshoring Lobby to drive their decisions – are paying attention.

If you still doubt how these big U.S. corporations have sold China much of the rope with which it’s determined to hang their own companies and all of America (paraphrasing Lenin’s vivid supposed description of and prediction about the perilously shortsighted greed of capitalists), you should check out the latest report of the U.S-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC). As made clear by this study from an organization set up by Congress to monitor the China threat, not only have the multinationals’ investments in China figured “prominently in China’s national development ambitions.” They also “may indirectly erode the United States’ domestic industrial competitiveness and technological leadership relative to China.”

Worst of all, “as U.S. MNE (“multinational enterprise) activity in China increasingly focuses on the production of high-end technologies, the risk that U.S. firms are unwittingly enabling China to achieve its industrial policy and military development objectives rises.”

And a special bonus – these companies’ offshoring has greatly increased America’s dependence on China for supplies of crucial healthcare goods.

Here’s just a sampling of the evidence presented (and taken directly by the Commission from U.S. government reports):

> U.S. multinationals “employ more people in China than in any other country outside of the United States, primarily in the assembly of computers and electronic products.” Moreover, this employment skyrocketed by 574.6 percent from 2000 to 2017.

> “China is the fourth-largest destination for U.S. MNE research and development (R&D) expenditure and increasingly competes with advanced economies in serving as a key research hub for U.S. MNEs. The growth of U.S. MNE R&D expenditure in China is also comparatively accelerated, averaging 13.6 percent yearon-year since 2003 compared with 7.1 percent for all U.S. MNE foreign affiliates in the same period. This expenditure is highest in manufacturing, particularly in the production of computers and electronic products.”

> “U.S. MNE capital expenditure in China has focused on the creation of production sites for technology products. This development is aided by the Chinese government’s extensive policy support to develop China.”

> The multinationals’ capital spending on semiconductor manufacturing assets “has jumped 166.7 percent from $1.2 billion in 2010 (the earliest year for which complete [U.S government] data is available) to $3.2 billion in 2017, accounting for 90 percent of all U.S. MNE expenditure on computers and electronic products manufacturing assets in China.”

> “China has grown from the 20th-highest source of U.S. MNE affiliate value added in 2000 ($5.5 billion) to the fifth highest in 2017 ($71.5 billion), driven primarily by the manufacture of computers and electronic products as well as chemicals. The surge is especially notable in semiconductors and other electronic components.”

> “[P]harmaceutical manufacturing serves as the largest chemical sector in terms of value-added [a measure of manufacturing output that seeks to eliminate double-counting of output by stripping out the contribution of intermediate goods used in final products]…” And chemicals – the manufacturing category that include pharmaceuticals – has become the second largest U.S-owned industry in China measured by the value of its assets (after computers and electronic products).

Incidentally, the report’s tendency to use 2000 as a baseline year for examining trends is no accident. That’s the year before China was admitted into the World Trade Organization (WTO) – and the numbers strongly reenforce the argument that the multinationals so avidly sought this objective in order to make sure that the value of their huge planned investments in China wouldn’t be kneecapped by any unilateral U.S. tariffs on imports from China (including those from their factories). For the WTO’s combination of consensus decision-making plus the protectionist natures of most of its members’ economies created a towering obstacle to Washington acting on its own to safeguard legitimate American domestic economic interests from Chinese and other foreign predatory trade and broader economic activity.

At the same time, despite the WTO’s key role in preserving the value of the multinationals’ export-focused China investments, the USCC study underestimates how notably such investment remains geared toward exporting, including to the United States. This issue matters greatly because chances are high that this kind of investment (in China or anywhere else abroad) has replaced the multinationals’ factories and workers in the United States. By contrast, multinational investment in China (or anywhere else abroad) that’s supplying the China market almost never harms the U.S. domestic economy and in fact can help it, certainly in early stages, by providing foreign customers that add to the domestic customers of U.S.-based manufacturers.

There’s no doubt that the phenomenal growth of China’s own consumer class in recent decades has, as the China Commission report observes, generated more and more American business decisions to supply those customers from China. In other words, the days when critical masses of Chinese couldn’t possibly afford to buy the goods they made in U.S.- and other foreign-owned factories are long gone.

But the data presented by the USCC does nothing to support this claim, and the key to understanding why is the central role played by computer, electronics, and other information technology-related manufacturing in the U.S. corporate presence in China. For when the Commission (and others) report that large shares of the output of these factories are now sold to Chinese customers, they overlook the fact that many of these other customers are their fellow entities comprising links of China-centric corporate supply chains. These sales, however, don’t mean that the final customers for these products are located in China.

In other words, when a facility in China that, for example, performs final assembly activities on semiconductors sells those chips to another factory in China that sticks them into computers or cell phones or HDTV sets, the sale is regarded as one made to a Chinese customer. But that customer in turn surely sells much of its own production overseas. As the USCC documents, China’s consumer market for these goods has grown tremendously, too. But China’s continually surging share of total global production of these electronics products (also documented in the Commission report) indicates that lots of this output continues to be sold overseas.

Also overlooked by the USCC – two other disturbing apects of the multinationals’ activities in China.

First, it fails to mention that all the computer and electronics-related investment in China – which presumably includes a great deal of software-related investment – has contributed to China’s economic and military ambitions not only by transferring knowhow to Chinese partners, but by teaching huge numbers of Chinese science and technology workers how to generate their technology advances. The companies’ own (often glowing) descriptions of these training activities – which have often taken the form of dedicated training programs and academies – were revealed in this 2013 article of mine.

Second, the Commission’s report doesn’t seem to include U.S. multinationals’ growing investments not simply in high tech facilities in China that they partly or wholly own, but in Chinese-owned entities. As I’ve reported here on RealityChek, these capital flows are helping China develop and produce high tech goods with numerous critical defense-related applications, and the scale has grown so large that some elements of the U.S. national security community had been taking notice as early as 2015. And President Trump seems to be just as oblivious to these investments as globalist former President Barack Obama was.

These criticisms aside, though, the USCC has performed a major public service with this survey of the multinationals’ China activities. It should be must reading in particular for anyone who still believes that these companies – whose China operations have so greatly enriched and therefore strengthened the People’s Republic at America’s expense – deserve much influence over the U.S. China policy debate going forward.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Closer U.S. Taiwan Ties Must Become a Two-Way Street

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alliances, allies, CCP Virus, China, coronavirus, COVID 19, decoupling, East Asia-Pacific, foreign investment, Hong Kong, Huawei, national security, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, South Korea, Taiwan, tech, Trade, Trump, TSMC, Wuhan virus

As if its CCP Virus coverup and planned crackdown on what’s left of Hong Kong’s freedoms weren’t bad enough, China has been escalating its aggressive words and deeds throughout its East Asia/Pacific neighborhood, and one major sign has been new pressure exerted on Taiwan – which Beijing views as a breakaway province that needs to end its rebellion immediately and join the Communist People’s Republic.

This more worrisome Chinese posture understandably has sparked calls for the United States to retaliate by demonstrating stronger support for Taiwan in various ways. This impulse also seems reasonable to me. But if the Trump administration speeds up its march down this road, it handles a closer relationship with Taiwan a lot better than its predecessors for decades had handled security alliance relationships with Japan and South Korea. Specifically, it’s crucial that Taiwan share much more of the burden of resisting China’s ambitions than has long been the case.

The latest alarm bells about China’s Taiwan policies have been set off by China’s words – or, more accurately, a missing word. Although the PRC (People’s Republic of China) has never renounced using force to achieve its longstanding aim “reunifying” China (as it defines the issue), its rhetorical positions toward the island have long fluctuated between the conciliatory and the blustery. But for 40 years, when Beijing mentioned of reunification, the word “peaceful” has always preceded it.

Last Friday, though, China’s second most important leader dropped the “peaceful” – and did it at a major forum: the annual meeting of the country’s rubberstamp parliament.

So it seems clear that the China cloud over Taiwan has darkened. But U.S. steps to bolster Taiwan’s security will greatly underperform – and may actually increase the dangers posed to America by China itself – unless Washington starts demanding in return that Taiwan stop its longstanding practice of investing massively in manufacturing in China, including in high tech sectors.

Indeed, as of 2018, according to this report, the total value of Taiwanese investment in China hit $180 billion – ten times the value of Taiwan’s investment in the United States. The annual amounts have been going down, but mainly because of the Trump administration’s tariffs on China, which have made it much more difficult for any factories in China – Chinese or foreign-owned – to earn fat profits by exporting major shares of their output to the United States. Even so, such investment had reached massive proportions. Indeed, in 2017. China still attracted nearly 45 percent of all Taiwan’s outbound foreign direct investment. Moreover, so much of this investment has come in technology sectors that fears have emerged of the island hollowing out its own innovation sector – which has been so vital to Taiwan’s spectacular economic development. And of course, Taiwanese companies like contract semiconductor manufacturing giant TSMC have been major suppliers of microchips and other high tech products to Chinese tech companies like Huawei, the global leader in advanced telecommunications.

It’s important to recognize that Taiwan is hardly the only U.S. ally that’s promoted China’s economic – and therefore technological and military – development. It’s not even the biggest. (That dubious honor goes to Hong Kong, but most of this Chinese “Special Administrative Region’s” direct investment flows to China seem to be concentrated in lower-tech, labor-intensive sectors without significant national security implications.) Moreover, the United States remains complicit itself.

But even though his administration doesn’t use the word, decoupling from China does appear to be a major goal of President Trump’s. There’s certainly been a lot of it. I’m not big at all on the United States embarking on a full-fledged campaign to mobilize East Asia/Pacific countries to out-compete China for influence in the  region. Indeed, I’ve argued that disentangling the United States from China economically is vital to ensure American security and prosperity on its own merits. But if President Trump does want to go the full-court anti-China press route, what’s the point if supposed American allies aren’t all-in on decoupling asd  as well?

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: A Cheer and a Half for Trump’s New China Strategy Document

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alliances, allies, America First, CCP Virus, China, coronavirus, COVID 19, decoupling, globalism, Josh Rogin, liberal global order, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Phase One, stock markets, technology, The National Interest, Trade, transactionalism, Trump, Washington Post, Wuhan virus

When over breakfast this morning I read Josh Rogin’s Washington Post column on the Trump administration’s new China strategy statement, I was pretty pleased. It’s been a long time since I viewed the intra-administration disagreements on the subject that its release has supposedly resolved as major problems in the China strategy overhaul that President Trump has sought, The tough and, more important, smart Phase One trade deal signed in mid-January was a convincing sign that the “doves” had been marginalized, but only one sign. The new statement itself describes many others. At the same time, the more basic agreement within Mr. Trump’s team, the better.

When I finally read the actual statement a little later, I was less pleased. It’s true that the President is both fully woke to the China threat, and that he’s reversed or overturned many of the disastrous mistakes made by his predecessors on a variety of fronts – including not only trade but technology, foreign investment, and exchange programs in particular. Moreover, the evidence is multiplying that the disaster created by the CCP Virus will lead to still tougher and, more important, still smarter measures. (A further crackdown on U.S. stock exchanges listings of Chinese entities is just one example.)

But the statement also made clear that Mr. Trump hasn’t made the clean break with previous globalist approaches to China and related aspects of American foreign policy that I’ve been advocating and that, as I’ve written, could lead to serious and needless dangers down the road. And as with much of the rest of the Trump framework, the big problem has to do with the role assigned to U.S. allies and alliances. Specifically, it’s still way too big, and not different enough from the globalist approach he’s rightly slammed verbally.

Not that “United States Strategic Approach to The People’s Republic of China” was devoid of America First-y ideas. It was great, for example, to see the administration reaffirm “Our approach is not premised on determining a particular end state for China. Rather, our goal is to protect United States vital national interests” (even though the United States keeps demanding, at least rhetorically, major structural reforms in China’s trade, technology, and other economic policies – demands I’ve explained are fruitless because of impossible monitoring and enforcement challenges).

Similarly encouraging, the top two vital interests identified: “(1) protect the American people, homeland, and way of life; (2) promote American prosperity….”

I also really liked “[T]he United States responds to the PRC’s [People’s Republic of China] actions rather than its stated commitments. Moreover, we do not cater to Beijing’s demands to create a proper ‘atmosphere’ or ‘conditions’ for dialogue. Likewise, the United States sees no value in engaging with Beijing for symbolism and pageantry; we instead demand tangible results and constructive outcomes.”

Indeed, the document adds, “We acknowledge and respond in kind to Beijing’s transactional approach with timely incentives and costs, or credible threats thereof.” This kind of transactionalism – expecting proposed foreign policy measures above all to create specific, measurable short-term benefits for the United States, rather than focusing on more ambitious steps that might turn out even better farther down the road, but whose success is far less certain – is a key tenet of America First foreign policies (as I’ve argued in the above linked National Interest article). Therefore, this explicit mention and endorsement of the term is most welcome (though it needs to be enshrined as a pillar of U.S. diplomacy elsewhere, too).

The statement’s treatment of transactionalism is closely related to its clear skepticism about another dubious globalist concept – though in this instance it’s more important for what it doesn’t say than for what it does: “[C]ompetition necessarily includes engagement with the PRC, but our engagements are selective and results-oriented, with each advancing our national interests….” I read this passage as an implicit announcement that the United States will no longer be seeking any particular kind of “relationship” with China, a gauzy goal that I’ve explained (on Twitter) creates powerful pressures to sacrifice concrete objectives in the here and now in the usually mistaken belief that the other party will feel obliged to make comparable sacrifices going forward – at some point.

And all this excellent material helps make clear why I’m so disappointed in the document’s numerous bow to globalism’s shibboleths. Two stand out in particular, and they’re so intimately intertwined as to be practically two sides of the same coin: the idea that it’s crucial for the United States to uphold something globalists (and the authors of this document) call a “rules-based international order,” and the maxim that critical building blocks of this order are America’s security alliances. The big problem from an America First standpoint with these notions? Once you buy into them, you’re back in Relationships-Uber-Alles-Land.

So I was distinctly unhappy to read passages like:

“[T]he United States does not and will not accommodate Beijing’s actions that weaken a free, open, and rules-based international order. We will continue to refute the CCP’s narrative that the United States is in strategic retreat or will shirk our international security commitments. The United States will work with our robust network of allies and likeminded partners to resist attacks on our shared norms and values, within our own governance institutions, around the world, and in international organizations.”

Indeed, the lionization of America’s international security commitments completely ignores problems that President Trump has rightly spotlighted – like flagrant defense free-riding, diplomatic fence-sitting, and trade policies that have ripped off America nearly as much as China’s. Just as thoroughly ignores problems that have largely escaped Mr. Trump’s notice – like the recent, rapidly growing nuclear war risks the United States has been running in places like the Korean peninsula and Eastern Europe precisely because its allies do so little to defend themselves. Does the Trump administration really believe it can count on these countries to help fight China if shooting starts?

Meanwhile, the similar shout-out to international organizations overlooks the administration’s warning in this very same document about the naivete of assuming that “engagement with rivals and their inclusion in international institutions and global commerce would turn them into benign actors and trustworthy partners.”

Another way to put this critique: The document pays no attention to the fundamental problem with rules-based order worship. In the last analysis, it’s never been based on adherence to rules – i.e., a consensus on what is and is not acceptable international behavior. It’s been based on a willingness of the so-called free world to allow the United States to bear most of the costs and risks of providing them with security and prosperity. Those costs and risks, however, have become unaffordable and unacceptable for the United States, and its allies have displayed no serious signs of helping carry the load.

Let’s end on a happier note: The new China document promises that the United States will judge China by its deeds and not by its words. And since despite the references to alliances and international orders, these considerations so far haven’t much inhibited the administration from hitting China ever harder, especially on the trade and technology fronts, focusing on its deeds seems like the best way to evaluate its China policy, too. 

In fact, here’s possibly the strongest proof of that pudding.  The document doesn’t once mention the aim or even the concept of “decoupling” – the notion that the United States should disengage economically from China as fast and as thoroughly as practicable.  But decoupling – indeed, big time decoupling – is exactly what’s been taking place during the age of Trump.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Long Overdue Curbs on U.S. Financial Investment in China Seem at Hand

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CCP Virus, China, coronavirus, COVID 19, cybersecurity, government workers, human rights, investing, investors, MSCI, national security, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, pensions, privacy, rogue regimes, sanctions, Steven A. Schoenfeld, surveillance, Thrift Savings Plan, Trump, Wuhan virus

A major debate has just broken into the open over some crucial questions surrounding the future of U.S.-China relations. Chances are you haven’t read about it much, but it essentially involves whether Americans will keep – largely unwittingly – sending immense amounts of money to a foreign regime that was long posing major and growing threats to America’s security and prosperity even before the current CCP Virus crisis. The details, moreover, represent a case in point as to how stunningly incoherent America’s China policy has been for far too long.

The controversy attained critical mass this week when the Trump administration on Monday “directed” the board overseeing the main pension plan for U.S. government employees and retirees (including the military) to junk a plan that would have channeled these retirement savings into entities from the People’s Republic. The President can’t legally force the managers of the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) to avoid China-related investments. But he does have the authority – in conjunction Congressional leaders – to appoint members to the board, and has just announced nominations to fill three of the five seats. 

This afternoon, the board announced that its recent China decision would be deferred. But because it’s still breathing, all Americans need to ask why on earth the U.S. government has ever allowed any investment in shares issued by entities from China (as known by RealityChek regulars, I refuse to call them “companies” or “businesses,” because unlike their supposed counterparts in mostly free market economies, they’re all ultimately agents of and most are massively subsidized by the Chinese government in one way or another). And why doesn’t the board just kill off the idea for good?    

After all, at the very least, Chinese entities often engage in the most fraudulent accounting practices imaginable, thereby preventing outsiders from knowing their real financial strengths and weaknesses. As just pointed out by Trump administration officials, many also play crucial roles in China’s human rights violations and engage in other practices (e.g., hacking U.S. targets, sending defense-related products and technologies to rogue regimes) that could subject them to national or global sanctions. Worst of all, the thick and secretive web of ties between many of these entities and the Chinese military mean that in a future conflict, U.S. servicemen and women could well get killed by weapons made by Chinese actors partly using their own savings.

Further, government workers’ savings aren’t their only potential or even actual source of U.S. financing. Any American individual or investment company or private sector pension plan is currently allowed to direct money not only toward any Chinese entity listed on American stock exchanges (even though regulators keep complaining about these entities’ lack of transparency – while generally continuing to permit their shares to trade). Such investment in Chinese entities listed on Chinese exchanges is perfectly fine, too. In addition, as documented on RealityChek, U.S.-owned corporations have long been remarkably free to buy stakes in Chinese entities whose products and activities clearly benefit the Chinese military.

Still, the idea of the federal government itself significantly bolstering the resources of China’s regimes belongs in wholly different categories of “stupid” and “reckless.” And don’t doubt that major bucks are involved. The total assets under management in the TSP amount to some $557 billion. And about $40 billion of these are currently allotted to international investments. (See the CNBC.com article linked above for these numbers.)

Could there be any legitimate arguments for permitting these monies – most of which are provided by U.S. taxpayers – to finance an increasingly dangerous Chinese rival? Defenders of the TSP China decision (prominent among whom are officials of public employee unions, who seem just fine with underwriting a Chinese government whose predatory trade practices have destroyed the jobs and ruined the lives and jobs of many of their private sector counterparts) maintain that the prime responsibility of the managers is maximizing shareholder value. And since the TSP had decided that the optimal mix of international holdings are essential for achieving this aim, it quite naturally and legitimately decided to move its overseas investments into the MSCI All Country World ex-US Investable Market index.

This tracking tool and the fund it spawned are widely considered the gold standard for good investment choices lying outside the United States, and in early 2019 decided to speed up a previous decision to triple the weighting it allots to China companies. The share is only about three percent, but who’s to say it stops there?

The TSP board unmistakably should be mindful of its fiduciary responsibilities to current and former federal workers. But as noted by the Trump administration, how can it adequately promote them when it’s transferring their savings into Chinese entities that are simply too secretive to trust and that may be crippled by U.S. sanctions?

More important, as managers of a government workers’ pension fund, TSP board members can’t expect to be treated like private sector fund managers. They clearly have responsibilities other than maximizing shareholder value, and undermining U.S. policies toward China (or on any other front) can’t possibly be part of their mandate.

Bringing the TSP in line with the broader emerging U.S. government approach to China wouldn’t solve the entire problem of huge flows of American resources perversely adding to Beijing’s coffers. This article by investment analyst Steven A. Schoenfeld (full disclosure: a close personal friend) details the alarming degree to which MSCI along with other major indexers have increased the China weightings in their emerging markets indices in particular to alarming levels – levels that aren’t easy to reconcile with the imperative of investment diversity, and that haven’t exactly been broadcast to the large numbers of individual investors who rely on them.

Even immediate, permanent new restrictions on TSP would do nothing to address this issue. Nor would they affect continuing private sector investment in Chinese entities that supply that country’s armed forces, and that strengthen its privacy-threatening hacking and surveillance capabilities.

But TSP curbs would be a start. And any TSP managers that don’t like them can quit and go to work on Wall Street.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Globalists Still Don’t Get it About the Needless Dangers of U.S. Global Leadership

If I was a conspiracy theorist, I’d be pointing to the fact that, on the very same day last week, two leading megaphones urging the return to a pre-Trump globalist approach to U.S. foreign policy came out with articles from two leading globalists preaching exactly the same message: The poor responses to the CCP Virus by both the United States and China are leaving the world dangerously leader-less.

Because I’m not a conspiracy theorist, I’ll focus instead on the fatal flaws in both these essays.

Beforehand, though, let’s note that at least these items are better than the previous cohort of establishment laments about missing world leadership, which tended to blame President Trump’s America First approach to foreign policy (or, more accurately, an approach that contains lots of America First-ism, as I discussed at length here) exclusively. True, the emergence of the virus in China and the real possibility that it leaked out of a Chinese biological research lab, make it more difficult to let Beijing off the hook for the intensified global tumult resulting from the pandemic. But we do live in an age of widespread Trump Derangement Syndrome, so any progress toward sanity is welcome.

All the same, the articles – in Foreign Affairs magazine, and on the Project-Syndicate.org website (which I like to call the establishment’s op-ed page) – sadly demonstrate the absence of any learning curve on the part of globalists at all, and three ignored lessons continue to stand out.

First, where did these folks ever get the idea that either before the CCP Virus’ outbreak, or before Mr. Trump’s inauguration, there was a world out there full of countries and other actors that either wanted to be led, or that was capable of being led, whether at acceptable risk and cost to the United States or not?

I readily concede that from roughly the end of World War II, the United States, Western Europe, and Japan formed a reasonably orderly grouping of countries with reasonably common objectives and declared agreement over U.S. leadership. Even so, major splits emerged on all sorts of key issues even at the height of the Cold War that provided a crucial common enemy (e.g., Germany rearmament in the early 1950s, the Suez crisis of 1956, nuclear deterrence policy – and especially who would bear the greatest risk and cost of nuclear war – at many different points, exchange rates and related economic and financial issues at many different points, recognizing China diplomatically, continuing the Vietnam War, dealing with the rise of Middle East oil power).

Moreover, as noted by many scholars, other observers (including yours truly), and even political leaders, this order and the version of leadership on which it depended was completely unsustainable for the United States in particular. For the refusal of its leading allies, even long after their post-World War II recoveries were complete, to share the military and economic burdens of the order’s maintenance continually sapped America’s capacity to play this role at acceptable cost and risk.

(It’s really important to recall, however, that Washington was no help, here, mainly because U.S. foreign policymakers and other political leaders liked the notion of running the world, however, illusory, as well as counterproductive for their countrymen. And they didn’t trust their main allies, especially former World War II foes Germany and Japan, to handle their own foreign policies responsibly, either on their own or in formal tandem tandem with others. The Germans and Japanese “going nuclear” was a special – and to some extent understandable – concern.)

Since the Cold War ended, evidence of order worthy of the name, and of support for a definition of U.S. leadership acceptable for U.S. interests, is that much more difficult to find. Indeed, I’m old enough to remember that during the current young century alone, the nation and world have experienced the emergence of global terrorism, the spread of nuclear weapons to places like North Korea, a global near-financial meltdown and punishing ensuing recession, the virtual collapse of numerous states in the Middle East and North and West Africa and resulting tidal waves of refugees, the reemergence of aggression from China and Russia). So could the globalists please stop waxing nostalgic about the orderliness of the pre-Trump period?

Interestingly, if anything, the idea and popularity of U.S. leadership actually strengthened. But the reason wasn’t good news for Americans. It stemmed from the willingness of the George H.W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama administrations to keep shouldering excessive burdens and tolerating allied free-riding, and indeed to bask in the glow of allied praise for this position, even as the risks and costs to the United States kept rising. Of course, the Bush 43 administration’s launch of the second Iraq War was an exception. But however loud and angry, it was first and foremost exceptional.

The second ignored lesson: Since the Trump presidency began, evidence remains in conspicuously short supply that any significant countries are seeking American leadership on a basis that’s sustainable for the United States. Obviously, China and Russia are outliers. And as for the allies, their prime reaction to Trump criticisms of defense free-riding and trade hypocrisy hasn’t been to acknowledge their clear legitimacy and move to step up accepting more leadership responsibilities. Aside from some modest, and thoroughly inadequate, increases in defense spending, their response has been to whine about Trump being a “unilateralist” and a “nationalist” and a “cowboy” and an ignorant skeptic of the idea that all international economic transactions are by definition win-win. In other words, they’ve had their chance to put their money where their mouths are regarding leadership and order-taking, and they’ve failed this test miserably.

The third ignored lesson: It’s entirely possible, and even likely, that for most of the world – especially U.S. allies – U.S. global leadership (especially of the Bush-Clinton-Obama variety) is indeed their best hope for attaining acceptable levels of security, independence, and prosperity. After all, individually, they’re incapable of achieving these goals on their own. And although their propects look more promising in combination (especially in Europe), the hope of an early Trump departure from the scene and of a return to pre-Trump U.S. policies has clearly dissuaded them from making the effort required for security and economic self-sufficiency. After all, resumed freeloading will be so much easier.

But as explained at length in that National Interest article linked above, in the crucial respects, the United States is not like these other countries. It doesn’t need to be a global leader, or to lead even any group of countries. For it is entirely able to achieve acceptable levels of security, independence, and prosperity on its own. Even better, a genuine America First strategy will greatly reduce and probably eliminate the rising nuclear risks to the U.S. homeland of its current alliance leadership role. 

As explained here, however, globalists have been unable (and maybe unwilling) to appreciate the United States’ distinctiveness because of a fundamental misreading of the nation’s geopolitical position (and advantages) dating to the middle of World War II. 

Fortunately, and especially for everyday Americans, these dangerously misconceived globalist views have been largely marginalized under President Trump. (At the same time, some avowed and influential America Firsters seem enamored with some version of U.S. global leadership, too.) The unapologetically globalist former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee this year, has based much of his campaign on a return to Obama-style globalism. That’s the clearest political choice Americans have faced since…their last presidential election!

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: A Sleepy U.S. Intelligence Response to the CCP Virus?

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Blob, CCP Virus, Central Intelligence Agency, China, CIA, coronavirus, COVID 19, intelligence community, Mainstream Media, Mike Pompeo, MSM, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, The New York Times, Trump, U.S. intelligence, Wuhan labs, Wuhan virus

The head-shaking problems with yesterday’s New York Times article on the Trump administration, the intelligence agencies, and the CCP Virus, start with the headline. Instead of “Trump Officials Are Said to Press Spies to Link Virus and Wuhan Labs,” it obviously should have been “Spies Investigating Virus Origin Proceeding Slowly and Grudgingly.” Because those were by far the most important alleged revelations it contained.

I say “alleged,” of course, because nearly all the new information the Times reporter team spotlighted is based on unnamed sources – which means it shouldn’t yet even be considered “information.” That doesn’t mean it’s not newsworthy. It simply means that this material amounts to what some intelligence officials, or other individuals who convinced the authors that they know the real story, for some (undisclosed reasons), want the reporters to make public. Sometimes this material turns out to be true and important, and sometimes it doesn’t qualify for either description. So we’ll just have to wait and see.

But even if the Times‘ findings are judged to be credible, it’s mind-boggling that the authors missed the real significance of what they were told – or at least it’s mind-boggling if you still consider the Mainstream Media as a reliable watchdog of democracy, rather than an appendage of the bipartisan, cross-institutional “Blob” that even a top Obama administration official complained had dominated both American implementation and even discussion of foreign policy matters for way too long.

For the bulk of the piece clearly shows that the Times‘ sources have real problems with the idea of the intelligence agencies spending much time and effort probing China’s responsibility for releasing an historic pandemic on Americans and the rest of the world.

Skeptical? Recall that this is a disease that’s now killed hundreds of thousands worldwide and, as widely noted recently, caused more fatalities than the Vietnam War – or soon will, as even those wondering about counting methodologies have to acknowledge. The official reaction has thrown 30 million Americans out of work already and almost certainly plunged the economy into a genuine depression that will reduce its growth and wealth- and opportunity-creating capacity for years.

In other words, the virus has inflicted far more damage on Americans than Islamic terrorists, Vladimir Putin, or whatever other threats the intelligence community is supposed to be monitoring.

Yet here’s what the article reported:

>”Senior Trump administration officials have pushed American spy agencies to hunt for evidence to support an unsubstantiated theory that a government laboratory in Wuhan….”

>”NBC News reported earlier that administration officials had directed intelligence agencies to try to determine whether China and the World Health Organization hid information early on about the outbreak.”

>”Richard Grenell, the acting director of national intelligence, has told his agencies to make a priority of determining the virus’s origin.”

In other words, despite the human and economic devastation wrought by the virus, readers are being told that the intelligence agencies weren’t exactly foaming at the mouth to figure out why these disasters happened. That’s tantamount to learning in early 1942 that the intelligence agencies needed to be directed to determine why Pearl Harbor happened. This is a situation the reporters are OK with? And believe has no major news value?

And the Times‘ unintentional revelations about blasé intelligence attitudes don’t stop there. For example, the article claims that “Most intelligence agencies remain skeptical that conclusive evidence of a link to a lab can be found….” and that “The C.I.A.’s judgment was based in part on the fact that no signs had emerged that the Chinese government believed the outbreak came from a lab.”

In addition, “Intelligence officials have repeatedly pointed out to the White House that determining the origins of the outbreak is fundamentally a scientific question that cannot be solved easily by spycraft” and “the agency has told policymakers it lacks enough information to either affirm or refute it. Only getting access to the lab itself and the virus samples it contains could provide definitive proof, if it exists….”

But the authors don’t even note that China has denied outside analysts of any kind access to the two Wuhan labs in question. Indeed, they simply treat is as a claim by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who is maybe not-so-coincidentally portrayed as “the administration’s most vocal hard-liner on China” who “in particular has tried to hammer China over the lab.” In other words, a zealot.

Perhaps more important, what these passages indicate is that the intelligence agencies have no access to the labs because the Chinese have placed them off limits and America’s spies are…shrugging their shoulders? Patiently waiting for Beijing to open the doors? It’s like none of the spies, or other sources on which the Times relied, knows the definition of “spycraft.” Or is especially interested in its practice.

On the one hand, it should go without saying that if the nation’s intelligence agencies are trying to penetrate the labs surreptitiously, no one connected with them, and especially no one who knows the inside story, would breathe a syllable about such efforts, even on background. On the other hand, the lips who spoke to the Times seem pretty loose. Moreover, it’s odd that these Times reporters, who  deal with these agencies and their practices all the time, didn’t themselves even mention a cover story as a possibility.

And regardless of what appears in the U.S. press, you need to assume that the Chinese are on the lookout for such espionage. Unless they’re feeling pretty confident in their ability to keep their secrets because, during the Obama administration, they “dismantled C.I.A. spying operations in the country starting in 2010, killing or imprisoning more than a dozen sources over two years and crippling intelligence gathering there for years afterward”?

Where did I read this contention, strongly indicating that U.S. intelligence agencies couldn’t penetrate the labs even if they wanted to? I read it in a 2017 story in The New York Times – written in part by two of the same reporters responsible for yesterday’s article. Yet somehow, this possibility never made it into yesterday’s piece.

Which raises the possibility that intelligence officials or their friends and well-wishers are pushing this tale of improper Trump administration pressure in order to hide their inability to reconstruct adequate China capabilities.

Yet there’s another possibility, and one that’s even more troubling: The Times‘ sources are really most concerned that, as the article conspicuously notes:

“Any American intelligence report blaming a Chinese institution and officials for the outbreak could significantly harm relations with China for years to come. And Trump administration officials could use it to try to prod other nations to publicly hold China accountable for coronavirus deaths even when the pandemic’s exact origins cannot be determined.”

In other words, these sources are first and foremost concerned with preserving what’s left of a pre-Trump China policy status quo with which virtually the entire American foreign policy establishment was entirely comfortable. And by the way – the Mainstream Media was entirely comfortable with that China policy, too.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Why Kissinger is Wrong About the CCP Virus and Geopolitics

Tags

America First, Carl von Clausewitz, CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, export bans, globalism, globalization, health security, Henry Kissinger, international organizations, liberal global order, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, realism, The Wall Street Journal, travel ban, Wuhan virus

As I’ve written previously on RealityChek, I’m a big Henry Kissinger fan. Not that I haven’t strongly, and even vehemently disagreed with the former Secretary of State and White House national security adviser on numerous issues. But I’ve considered his experience making foreign policy and studying its history to be orders of magnitude more impressive than anyone else on the national and worldwide diplomatic scenes for decades, and so believe that everything he writes deserves to be taken seriously.

And that’s why I found his recent Wall Street Journal article on the implications of the CCP Virus outbreak for U.S. foreign policy and global geopolitics so disappointing. For it differs little from the standard globalist drivel that’s been regurgitated lately about how the pandemic once again shows the need for more international cooperation and stronger international institutions because it’s one of those threats that “doesn’t respect borders.”

To be sure, Kissinger has always been quite the globalist himself in many ways, differing mainly with this foreign policy approach by insisting that American leaders can never forget the realities or power and other globally divisive forces responsible for how conflict has dominated world history. But the Journal essay is completely devoid of Kissinger’s characteristic efforts to integrate the kind of foreign policy “realism” with which, on the one hand, he’s been (simplistically) associated, and what genuine realists (and America Firsters like me) regard as the kumbaya-saturated means and ends of globalism on the other.

The author’s goal of transitioning to a global “post-coronavirus order” is quintessential Kissinger – who has long believed much more than other globalists that creating and preserving a substantial degree of international stability is essential to what all supporters of this school of thought have recognized as the imperative of preventing war between the great powers – especially in a nuclear age. (For a fuller explanation of the differences among these various foreign policy approaches, see this 2018 article of mine.)

But Kissinger’s essay is devoid of his characteristic attempts to integrate even his highly qualified brand of realism (let alone a more – in my opinion – hardheaded America First strategy) with the globalist insistence that major conflict is best prevented by addressing its supposedly underlying economic and social causes.

As a result, Kissinger emphasizes that “No country, not even the U.S., can in a purely national effort overcome the virus.” And that the current crisis “must ultimately be coupled with a global collaborative vision and program.” And that the “principles of the liberal world order” must be “safeguarded.” And that, in particular, nations must resist the temptation to revive the ambition of retreating behind walls because nowadays, prosperity depends on global trade and movement of people.

The problem, as I’ve pointed out in the article linked above, is that even a strategy focused on such global cooperation and other goals needs to understand that, because there remain great differences among countries on how best to achieve them, and in some important instances on the goals themselves, only power (in both military and economic forms) ultimately can guarantee any country that its preferred approaches and ambitions will prevail. And that even goes for working within international institutions. To paraphrase the great 19^th century Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz, working with international organizations is nothing but the continuation of power politics with other means.

Nor is there any acknowledgement in Kissinger’s piece of the United States’ unique capacity for self-sufficiency in both producing heathcare-related goods and developing vaccines and cures for diseases, or for the unmistakable need greatly to strengthen this capacity given the literally dozens of export bans imposed on drugs and drug ingredients and medical devices and protective equipment by countries that do normally sell them overseas. And as for Kissinger’s reference to the importance of global travel, yes…but look at all the countries that have imposed restrictions on travel from China alone.

Kissinger ends his article by citing U.S. policy after World War II as an example of the kind of enlightened course Washington should pursue because of its clear success in “growing prosperity and [enhancing] human dignity.” But as that postwar era dawned, the United States was so globally predominant in terms of material power that it could afford to finance for decades most of the effort needed to achieve these goals without undercutting its own position. And of course more than half that postwar world wound up organizing itself in opposition. In other words, it seems that Kissinger has forgotten one of the main lessons learned by all truly great historians – that the past rarely repeats itself exactly, or even very close.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Meanwhile, Back at the Tech Wars….

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5G, China, Financial Times, Forbes, free trade, globalization, Huawei, Mainstream Media, national security, offshoring, offshoring lobby, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, semiconductors, tech, telecommunications, telecoms, Trade, Trump

Free trade extremists who haven’t been shocked into reality by America’s dangerous levels of dependence on health care goods imports from Chinese and other foreign suppliers (i.e., many of them) just got another whack by a two-by-four from Beijing.

Hot on the heels of a Chinese threat to embargo exports to the United States of pharmaceuticals and drug ingredients needed to fight the CCP Virus has come a new Chinese warning – that American efforts to restrict U.S. and other foreign supplies of semiconductors, other crucial electronic components, and software needed by its telecommunications giant Huawei could trigger “counter-measures” that would damage the U.S. tech sector and the American and broader global economies.

The bad news here is that, just as with the Chinese economy overall with many medicines and their ingredients, government-controlled Huawei has seized world leadership in much of the hardware needed to build next-generation 5G communications systems – which of course have already begun to be installed worldwide. Since state-of-the-art communications is crucial both to economic prosperity and national security, Huawei’s success has triggered alarm bells even among many American leaders who were long happy to support the reckless U.S. trade and related tech policies that enabled China to steal and extort much of the knowhow that build Beijing’s tech sector – and looked the other way as American firms voluntarily transferred much of the rest.  (See here for an especially revealing partial account of this tech policy disaster.)

But there’s good news, too. First, U.S.-headquartered companies still hold what a Financial Times article shows are “strategic chokepoints on Huawei’s phones, from the Android operating system to RF front-end chips and the chip architectures by Arm Holdings….” (To be sure, however, this Huawei dependence is shrinking.)

Second, as reported here in Forbes, Huawei’s overall sales performance outside its home market has been so weak that it’s now “completely dependent on China for its growth.” And thanks to the worldwide recession triggered by the pandemic that of course began in China, and because of continuing national security-driven reluctance by foreign governments to give Huawei free rein in their own markets, the entity’s overseas troubles are likely to intensify. (Note: Because of pervasive Chinese state control, RealityChek refuses to call outfits like Huawei “companies” or “businesses,” as such terms suggest great common ground with enterprises in largely free-market economies.)

At the same time, let’s not whistle in the dark here.  The trade and broader globalization policies responsible for these economic and national security vulnerabilities were pushed so hard so successfully for so long by pre-Trump Presidents and Congresses, that digging out of the present hole will require even more outside-the-box thinking than even the current administration has contemplated. And its task isn’t being made any easier by the efforts of the corporate Offshoring Lobby, its political and think tank hired guns, and the Mainstream Media journalists who still slavishly follow their cues, to yank the country back to globalization business-as-usual.      

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Globalists Remain as Clueless as Ever on the CCP Virus

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America First, Catch 22, CCP Virus, Clinton administration, coronavirus, COVID 19, globalism, health security, healthcare products, Joseph Heller, Madeleine Albright, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, pandemics, TIME, Wuhan virus

The current CCP (for Chinese Communist Party) Virus outbreak has intensified a broad debate about America’s grand strategy in world affairs.

Specifically, supporters of an America First-type strategy (including, to some extent, President Trump) believe that the key to current and future anti-pandemic success, and overall national success, is building up national capabilities – like restoring lost production capacity in healthcare goods like pharmaceuticals and medical devices (think “ventilators”).

Pushing back is a school of thought now called “globalism” – a handy shorthand for backers of pre-Trump U.S. foreign policies who have long insisted that the nation’s best bet for adequate levels of security and freedom and prosperity is strengthening mechanisms of international cooperation. Not that the globalists completely neglected the need for national self-sufficiency, especially in terms of purely military products, or national sovereignty. But they clearly sought to “bend the curve” of American national security and foreign economic policy toward buttressing global capacities instead of national capacities. My evidence? The very healthcare goods shortages America is facing today.

As RealityChek regulars know, I’m squarely in the America First camp. And my confidence in this strategy has just been immeasurably bolstered by having read Madeleine Albright’s new essay in TIME defending the focus on cooperation.

I’m this confident not simply because Albright has long been one of the dimmest bulbs in the globalists’ ranks – despite having served as Secretary of State (during the Clinton administration). As I’ve previously noted, she never seemed to have learned the definition of “deterrence.” Instead, I’m mainly confident because her own new post (unwittingly) explains why it’s globalism that – in her words – reflects “childish” beliefs.

To oversimplify a little, the America First strategy doesn’t softpedal cooperative efforts because it’s selfish or mean or any of those human character traits that so commonly (yet so misleadingly) are used to characterize approaches to world affairs and the motives underlying them. Instead, its emphases stem from the assumption that American leaders can’t count anytime soon on the rest of the world adopting the kind of cooperative ethos needed to transition to globalism safely, and that as a result self-reliance is the only realistic choice available.

It’s also important to note that support for the America First strategy doesn’t require believing that all of most or even any other countries can rely on their own devices as well. Rather, it requires understanding how distinctively capable of self-reliance the United States has always been – and how much more self-reliant it can become.

Albright regurgitates the standard globalist points about how the main foreign dangers to the United States, including pandemics

“do not respect boundaries. They include rogue governments, terrorists, cyber warriors, the uncontrolled spread of advanced weapons, multinational criminal networks and environmental catastrophe. These perils cannot be defeated by any country acting alone, and any country would be foolish to try.”

Yet here’s what she also observes about the current state of world affairs:

>”[T]he largest and most powerful national governments are not prioritizing the improvement of our capacity for international cooperation.”

>”Hyper-nationalist leaders across the globe seem determined to ignore the awareness of interdependence that was—in the last century—drummed into our minds at a nearly unbearable cost.”

>”In the past two decades, jingoism has returned and spread in the manner of a contagious disease. Instead of highlighting the need for global teamwork, the doctrine of “every nation for itself” has taken hold on matters involving oil prices, trade, refugees, climate change, the regulation of communications technology and more.”

>“Look around: where are the leaders who will remind us of our mutual obligations and shared fate? In Moscow? Beijing? London? Rome? Paris? New Delhi? Ankara?”

>”[A] huge gap has opened between what the international community needs and the patchy, underfunded, under-energized reality now in place. The size of this gap represents a failure on the part of leaders on every continent….”

It’s true that Albright seeks to pin the blame on “a vacuum at the top that only the United States can fill.” But is claim is not only loony, but clueless. For this kind of leadership obviously requires the kind of superior material power and wealth that, in a world lacking common rules because common values are missing, have always been essential to influence behavior abroad. And relative American power in all fields except actual weapons and military equipment (though not in the materials, parts, and components needed to build them) has always been dismissed by the globalists as a pipe dream.

In one of the dark comedy classic novel Catch 22‘s numerous stunningly insightful exchanges, Yossarian, the main character who’s trying to have himself declared crazy and therefore unfit for combat or any kind of military service, tells one of his superior officers, “From now on I’m thinking only of me.” As author Joseph Heller continues:

“Major Danby replied indulgently with a superior smile: ‘But, Yossarian, suppose everyone felt that way.’ 

“‘Then,” said Yossarian, ‘I’d certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn’t I?’”

That’s obviously disastrous advice for Americans today – and inexcusably so, since the nation unmistakably has built up a network of shared values that marks it as a genuine community, and consequently a political unit that makes cooperation both necessary and possible to begin with. When it comes to the (undeniably anarchic) “international community” – not nearly so much.

Which is why until Madeleine Albright and other globalists acknowledge this situation, and the policy imperatives flowing logically therefrom, you’d need to be a damned fool to take them seriously as well.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: A Big Hint that America Finally Needs to Leave NATO

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alliances, allies, Article V, Cato Institute, defense spending, Europe, free-riding, globalism, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, nuclear war, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Pew Research Center, tripwire, Trump

Whenever I’ve written about America’s security alliances lately, I’ve emphasized the unacceptable dangers they pose to the nation’s safety because they commit the United States to risk nuclear attack to defend countries that clearly now don’t belong on the list of U.S. vital interests – that is, countries so important to America that their independence literally is worth the complete destruction of major individual cities and even genuine armageddon.

Earlier this week, however, a reminder has appeared about another crucial reason to ditch the granddaddy of these alliances – the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Revealingly, it also strongly bears out President Trump’s charges that U.S. allies in the region where they’re concentrated (Europe) have been shamelessly free-riding on the United States. Indeed, the new information also underscores how the allied defense deadbeats are not only ripping America off economically (which seems to be Mr. Trump’s main concern), but how their cheapskate defense budgets are fueling the nuclear risk faced by the United States.

The evidence comes in the form of a new survey of the populations of NATO member countries (including the United States) released by the Pew Research Center, and if you stopped with the headline (“NATO Seen Favorably Across Member States”) you’d understandably think that everything is just dandy in alliance-land. But check out the chart below, which for some reason doesn’t appear until the middle of the Pew report. Its central message should outrage the entire nation.

 

For it shows that although NATO populations are confident that the United States “would defend them from Russian attack,” they’re decidedly unenthusiastic about their own countries participating in the defense of another NATO member. Specifically, a median of 60 percent of residents of NATO Europe (along with Canada) countries express such confidence in America’s military (including nuclear) guarantee (versus 29 percent who are not so convinced). But by a 50-38 percent margin, they oppose their own country joining in.

Of the fourteen NATO members surveyed, populations in only four (the United Kingdom, Canada, Lithuania, and the Netherlands) favored using military force to defend a fellow NATO ally. Yet in only four (Turkey, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic) did majorities not expect the United States would use force to defend them.

The gap was widest in Italy (where only 25 percent favored helping defend another ally versus 75 percent believing that the United States would ride to its own rescue) and narrowest in the Netherlands (where the numbers were 64 percent and 68 percent respectively). The Italians also were the most confident in the United States in absolute terms, and tied with the Greeks for the least willing to help out. The only NATO members in which majorities supported both propositions were the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Lithuania.

Americans should be infuriated by these results for several intertwined reasons. First, the obligation to come to the defense of a fellow NATO member is at the heart of the alliance (and indeed of any alliance) and is spelled out in Article V of the NATO treaty. Although it’s true that members can always ignore legal obligations when push comes to shove, that’s long been much more difficult for the United States – because of its policy of stationing its own forces in many NATO countries (as well as in South Korea) to serve as “tripwires.” The idea has been that once they’re bloodied by attackers, and indeed about to be overwhelmed (because of their relatively small size) American Presidents will have no real choice but to respond with the U.S.’ equalizer – nuclear weapons.

This prospect was supposed to deter attack in the first place, and the (very) good news is that this strategy worked to keep the peace in Europe throughout the Cold War, and is still working. The bad news is that during the Cold War, the main European beneficiaries were countries whose independence was arguably vital to America – like the United Kingdom, (West) Germany, and France. Nowadays, the main beneficiaries are countries whose independence was never even during the Cold War viewed as vital to the United States – principally, the former Soviet bloc countries.

Yet although the stakes have shrunken dramatically, Washington continues to brandish the nuclear sword. And this risky American strategy remains in place – as it always has – because the European allies’ military forces have remained far too small and weak to repel a Soviet/Russian attack on their own, or with the help of modest U.S. non-nuclear forces. Worse, the Pew results also strongly suggest that if war did break out, American leaders could not for long even count on the help of allied forces even if it was provided initially. That’s an unparalleled recipe for disaster on the actual battlefield.

The Pew findings make the reason for this alarming situation glaringly obvious – the allies have skimped on their military spending out of confidence that the Americans would always answer their call. So why shouldn’t they save the big bucks that would be needed for genuine self-defense and use them for other purposes – like generous welfare states? Even better, the Americans would be left holding the nuclear risk bag, since once any conflict on the conflict escalated to that level, the nuclear conflict would be fought over their heads.

In addition, the Pew survey reinforces the results of a poll released last fall and alertly reported by my good friend Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute (who’s also just come out with an important new book on the subject).

Let’s be totally clear: This European approach has always made perfect sense from a European standpoint. But it not only makes no sense for the United States – it’s a strategy that creates the danger of national suicide because of decisions that still yoke the country’s fate to manifestly unreliable foreign publics.

Weirder yet: Avowedly America First champion President Trump has been steadily increasing the U.S. military presence in NATO’s most vulnerable – eastern European – members without having secured military spending increases from the other NATO countries that are remotely game changing.

It’s tough, therefore, to avoid the conclusion that America’s NATO allies are now giving Washington the broadest possible hint that it’s time for the United States to leave – because they’ve become utterly unreliable on top of their defense free-riding.  Why is the President acting as reluctant as any globalist to take it?