Our So-Called Foreign Policy: My Ukraine Peace Plan

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Russia, Ukraine, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, sanctions, diplomacy, NATO, energy, European Union, North Atlantic treaty Organization, EU, nuclear war, Ukraine War, World War 3

As I’ve repeatedly argued, every day the Ukraine war lasts, the United States runs an ever greater risk of the conflict going nuclear and the American homeland coming under attack. And as I’ve also argued, the creation of any such nuclear risk is completely unacceptable because despite all the military aid provided by Washington, the U.S government still hasn’t backed admitting Ukraine to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). That alliance of course is made up of countries whose security the United States has officially designated as vital, and thus by definition worth incurring such risks.

So in order to ensure that U.S. leaders don’t continue exposing the American population to a catastrophe that would make the September 11 attacks look like a mosquito bite on behalf of a country Washington still doesn’t regard as worth that candle, the war needs to end ASAP. And here’s a plan (or as they like to say in the political and policy worlds, a “framework”) that might do the trick.

First, an immediate ceasefire is declared, and then enforced by troops from some of the large developing countries that have voted to condemn the Russian invasion but failed so far to provide Ukraine with any support (like India or Indonesia or Brazil).

Second, (and the sequencing of the following steps can take any number of forms), NATO announces that it will never admit Ukraine as a member, But  NATO and other countries reserve the right to provide Kyiv with as much in the way of conventional armaments (including systems considered as “offensive”) as they wish.

Third (Version A), Russia gets to keep the Crimea but agrees that the the two eastern Ukrainian provinces with the big ethnic Russian populations will decide their own fates in internationally supervised referenda. In addition, any inhabitants of all three regions who wish to leave either before or after such votes get relocation assistance (preferably to Ukraine, but other European countries should feel free to take them in, too). The funding would come partly from the West (mainly by the European members of NATO), and partly from a percentage of revenues earned by Russia from the dropping of sanctions on Russian energy exports.

Third (Version B), same as above but Russia simply gets to keep the two eastern provinces and Crimea outright. Again, however, emigration by any of their inhabitants is funded by the West and by those Russian energy revenues. For the record, I like version A best.

Fourth, Russia drops its objections to Ukraine joining the European Union (EU).

Fifth, in order to enable Ukraine to maximize the economic benefits of EU membership, the West (again, mainly the European members of NATO) commits to large economic aid and reconstruction packages dependent largely on Kyiv’s progress in rooting out corruption. I’d also be in favor of empowering the donors to bypass the Ukrainian government in financing worthy recipients directly, to ensure that Ukrainian officials don’t steal most of the assistance.

Sixth, non-energy sanctions on doing any kind of business with Russia are phased out contingent on the absence of Russian aggressive actions against Ukraine (including efforts by Russian-funded paramilitary groups to destabilize Ukrainian territory). That is, the longer Moscow behaves well toward Ukraine, the more sanctions get dropped.

Seventh, the West agrees not to prosecute any Russian officials (including military officers) for war crimes.

Eighth and last, Russia and NATO begin negotiations to explore ideas for new arrangements that longer term could further enhance the security both of Russia and its European neighbors, including the Balkans and Moldova. These initiatives should be led by the Europeans.

Because the above proposals are just a framework, and neither set in stone nor presented in any great degree of detail, I’m absolutely open to suggestion regarding modifications, refinements, and additions. But for anyone wishing to pony up their ideas, I hope they consider first and foremost the needs to (a) defuse an exceedingly dangerous current situation with frightening potential to damage the American homeland gravely; (b) give both Russia and Ukraine significant reasons to claim at least partial victories; and (c) realize how easy it is to make the perfect the enemy of the good.

And on that last point, I hope that Ukraine war hawks and others who stress the imperatives of punishing any and all aggressions, and/or forcing the Russians to pay serious penalties for their invasion, and ensuring that Russia in the future becomes to weak to endanger Ukraine or any other country ever again, would keep the following in mind: The current regime in Moscow is so mismanaging the country and wasting its considerable resources (especially human), that it’s doing a great job of diminishing its power and potential all by itself.

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Our So-Called Foreign Policy: A Call to Return to Failed U.S. China Strategies

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alliances, allies, Barack Obama, Biden, China, Donald Trump, engagement, FOREIGNPOLICY.com, George W. Bush, Indo-Pacific, intellectual property theft, Michael J. Green, national security, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Paul Haenle, tech transfer, TPP, Trans-Pacific Partnership, World Trade Organization, WTO

When it comes to China-related issues in particular, supposed American experts who have long completely missed the mark have developed a head-exploding habit of assuming that they have anything useful to say on the matter going forward. Here’s a recent example.

Now these failed economic and foreign policy establishmentarians have hit new heights (or is is “depths”?) of chutzpah. As laid out in this article last week on FOREIGN POLICY magazine’s website, two typical figures are now attacking President Biden’s approach to the People’s Republic for taking too Trump-ian a turn, and blaming his alleged mistakes on learning the wrong lessons from the records of pre-Trump Presidents.

Whereas both the Biden and Trump teams, they write, have accused their predecessors of naively assuming that “engagement would lead to a democratic and cooperative China,” in fact, since the initial Nixon Era opening to Beijing, American leaders have fully understood that China’s democratization could never be a foregone conclusion, and have always “combined engagement with strategies to counterbalance China through alliances, trade agreements, and military power.” In other words, far from being disastrously pathetic failures, America’s pre-Trump China policies were actually as successful as was humanly possible,  And current leaders should emulate some of their principal choices. 

Even the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, they continue, which faced a China whose wealth and power had begun growing stunningly, had foreseen the possibility of Beijing turning more aggressive, and responded to warning signs exactly as events prescribed. Further, their decisions to stay on an engagement track as well were entirely shrewd and responsible. After all, major potential benefits could still plausibly be expected – because during those years, “the question of how China would use its growing power was open to shaping.”

Indeed, say authors Michael Green (a former Bush-ie) and Paul Haenle (previously both a Bush-ie and Obama-naut), a harder line at that time would have amounted to a policy of “strangling China” that also would have been opposed by major allies and the American people, “both of whom mainly saw China as a partner [and] would not have supported containment and decoupling.“

All that went wrong was that that darned current Chinese dictator Xi Jinping assumed power and, well, just ruined everything with his belligerently expansionist aims and actions, and his reversal of much Chinese economic liberalization. The 2008-09 financial crisis didn’t help, either, according to Geen and Haenle, because it convinced Beijing that “the West was declining and the East is rising.”

All the same, say Green and Haenle, the Biden administration should

>recognize that the two immediate pre-Trump presidents had the security side of China policy fundamentally right with their strategy of maintaining and strengthening U.S. alliances with major Asian countries (an odd recommendation since that’s what Mr. Biden is already trying to do); and

>on the economic side, “reconstruct some of the economic statecraft that underpinned U.S. strategies toward China in the past” – principally reviving the World Trade Organization (WTO) as “an important tool to hold China to account” for its predatory practices and joining the current version of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which can “bring the weight of almost two-thirds of the world economy to the table in demanding reciprocal agreements from China” and “force Beijing to play by the rules or lose hundreds of billions of dollars in trade as tariffs and market barriers among the rule-abiding economies went down.”

But these arguments only strengthen the case that Green, Haenle and their ilk should be kept as far away as possible from U.S. policymaking toward China.

Regarding security issues, their contention that Bush-Obama hedging was responsible and understandable ignores all the ways in which China had been undercutting U.S. national security interests long before the Age of Xi began in 2012. For example, it played a key role in creating Iran’s nuclear weapons program starting in the mid-1980s. It’s been a major supporter of North Korea’s economy – and therefore an enabler of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons development for decades. And it’s beefed up its military presence in the South China Sea – including island grabs that violate international law – for nearly as long.

And Green and Haenle seem to need some improved calendar-reading skills, as financial crisis-borne hubris to which they attribute much of Beijing’s recent bellicosity dates from 2008-09 – three to four years before Xi became China’s top leader. Against this backdrop, it’s glaringly obvious that, judged by actual results, the various hedging statements and even counter-measures mentioned by Green and Haenle counted for exactly squadoosh.

In addition, there’s compelling evidence that the Chinese thought so, too. As I reported in 2018, a former U.S. Chief of Naval Operations (the Navy’s senior-most officer) has stated that his Chinese counterpart told him that “he thought the United States would have a more forceful reaction when China began” one of its key island-building phases during the former’s tenure – during the Obama years.

P.S. – this behavior doesn’t exactly jibe with the notion that Beijing was blown away by Bush-Obama alliance-rallying, either.    

If anything, the Bush and Obama China economic policies were worse, at least in terms of long-run security impact. Both presided virtually passively as

>China’s economic predation helped produce trade surpluses that put literally trillions of dollars at Beijing’s disposal to devote to its military buildup and prevent any guns versus butter tensions from emerging;

>China stole intellectual property seemingly at will, which supercharged weapons development, too; and

>U.S. multinational companies felt perfectly free to transfer cutting-edge defense-relevant technology to Chinese partners that were first and foremost agents of the Chinese state, and to teach perhaps hundreds of thousands of Chinese employees and students how to use this knowhow – and ultimately how to develop more on their own.

As for the authors’ economic recommendations, they’re simply laughable. The TPP, after all, contained a wide-open back door through which goods with lots of Chinese content could enter the proposed free trade – largely because none of the other TPP signatories wanted to disrupt production chains in which China plays a key role.

Meanwhile, that robust China-Asia/Pacific trade and investment, plus the difficulty that Mr. Biden has run into in mobilizing support outside Europe against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is telling all but the willfully deaf that the United States will suddenly become able to increase the WTO’s effectiveness against China’s mercantilism. 

As Green and Haenle suggest, being able to learn from both mistakes and successes is one of life’s most valuable skills.  Sadly, all that their article demontrates is either that they can’t tell the difference, or that they stubbornly refuse to.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: U.S. Microchip Failures Have Now Worsened its Korea Nuclear Dilemmas

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allies, Biden, China, deterrence, extended deterrence, North Korea, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, semiconductors, South Korea, Taiwan, tripwire

As needs to become clear to U.S. leaders as South Korea’s president visits the United States, America’s loss of global leadership in the knowhow needed to make the world’s most advanced semiconductors now could expose the United States to nuclear attack from not one but two adversaries in East Asia.

The first threat of course comes from China, and stems from the possibility that it invades Taiwan. Because the island is the undisputed champ in manufacturing the most powerful chips, a Beijing victory could give it access to technology that’s crucial for making state-of-the-art weapons today, and for generations to come. And because that prospect, rightly in my view, is seen in Washington as an unacceptable threat to U.S. security, independence, and prosperity, the Biden administration has apparently decided to defend the island if the Chinese military moves.

The huge problem with this policy – which hasn’t been announced formally but has been mentioned in various seemingly off-the-cuff statements by Mr. Biden – is that success may require U.S. nuclear weapons use, and the Chinese have the forces to retaliate by attacking the American homeland with their own nukes. Maybe the possibility of a U.S. counter-strike on China would deter Beijing from pressing its nuclear buttons. But maybe it wouldn’t.

The threat that’s come into focus in recent days comes from North Korea and the target is South Korea – which unlike Taiwan is a full-fledged U.S. treaty ally that enjoys a longstanding and clearly stated American nuclear guarantee. Moreover, as is also not the case with Taiwan, the United States will find it exceedingly difficult to avoid nuclear weapons use if the North invaded the South. Worse, that’s so even if America ultimately concludes that South Korea’s security isn’t worth risking nuclear attack from a Pyongyang arsenal that’s smallish but could be able right now to reach American soil.

That’s because, as I’ve described repeatedly, American leaders have decided to bolster the credibility of the U.S. deterrent by stationing tens of thousands of American ground troops right in the way of any North Korean attack. The idea is to convince the North that to prevent its superior conventional forces from overwhelming the Americans, a U.S. President would launch his own nukes to destroy the invaders and likely the whole of North Korea.

This aim of intimidating the North with nuclear threats made sense when the United States had an enormous nuclear arsenal and Pyongyang was nuke-less. It even made sense when North Korea’s stockpile was even smaller than at present, and much less impressive. But due to the North’s recent progress and consequent current or imminent ability to vaporize an American city – or two or three – the U.S. nuclear guarantee, and the continuing presence of U.S. forces in the South whose vulnerability could force Washington into a damaging nuclear exchange, looks positively masochistic.

As a result, I’d argued for many years at least for withdrawing the tripwire and thereby increasing the odds that an American President would initiate a nuclear conflict with the North. Yes, South Korea could well be lost. But the United States itself would be saved from catastrophe. And of course South Korea could eventually respond by building up its own conventional military and going nuclear itself. Am I eager to see the roster of foreign nuclear weapons states expand? Of course not. But would this be better than the annihilation of Los Angeles or San Francisco or Seattle? That’s even a question?

It’s possible, however, that semiconductor-wise, South Korea might be as valuable as Taiwan. And if it’s still behind, it’s semiconductor manufacturing capabilities certainly aren’t far behind. (See this post for a sense of how complicated it is to determine who’s ahead.) Much more certain – the South is considerably ahead of American industry.

I’m not so much concerned that if the South felt abandoned, its microchip prowess would fall into the hands of the North Koreans. I’m much more concerned that a South Korea that’s decoupled from the United States security-wise would keep helping China develop its own semiconductor industry by building more and more advanced chip factories in the People’s Republic. It’s not just a distinct possibility, it’s a virtual certainty because China’s immense electronics industry is an immensely important customer for these South Korean chip manufacturers – just as it is for the U.S. semiconductor companies and chip equipment manufacturers that are equally guilty of strengthening China.

But the U.S. firms’ China operations and plans are now significantly restricted by the Biden administration’s tough sanctions. Even though it’s a U.S. treaty ally, South Korea has enacted no such curbs, and is still resisting American pressure to join Washington’s containment campaign. If the South feels cut loose by America, it’s not likely to sell China its crown jewel microchip tech. But as noted above, keeping on its current course could be damaging to major U.S. interests, too.

And that’s not even the end of the Biden administration’s current dilemmas. For there’s plenty of evidence that, despite the tripwire U.S. forces on their soil, South Korea’s leaders and its people no longer believe the Americans will ride to their rescue, or ride hard enough to risk nuclear war. So in principle, the United States could be stuck with the worst of all possible worlds – forced to maintain its current, nuclear war-risking approach to defending South Korea in hopes of preserving some semiconductor leverage with the South, but lacking the clout to gain meaningful South Korean support for limiting China’s tech progress. Reportedly, President Biden has decided to handle the situation with more energetic efforts to reassure the South.

Alternatively, South Korea could decide that it still doesn’t trust Washington, build its own nuclear weapons anyway, and feel even freer to go its way on China.

I can envision various scenarios in which all these needles are threaded to America’s advantage for the time being – and perhaps longer. But there are no guarantees. Meaning that the big takeaway is that when it comes to critical technologies, there’s no substitute for a Do It Yourself determination to maintain American leadership to avoid needing to rely on the kindness of strangers (and even allies) – or as is the case now, to restore it.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Yes, America’s Europe Allies Really are Lagging in Decoupling from China

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allies, Biden administration, China, decoupling, Emanuel Macron, European Union, foreign direct investment FDI, France, investment, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Trade

Since French President Emanuel Macron’s boot-licking recent trip to China, something of a debate has broken out this past week over whether America’s European allies are moving fast enough to reduce their dependence on commerce with the People’s Republic – or as fast as the United States is. Here’s a claim that they are. And here’s one that they aren’t.

How to know for sure – or with some confidence? Maybe by looking at some numbers? So I did. And the two most important 30,000-foot measures of trade and investment show that the Europeans are lagging significantly – in absolute term and relative to the United States. In fact, both measures indicate that investment in and especially trade with China recently has become more important to the European Union (EU), not less.

The gauges I use are two-way trade as a share of the total U.S. and European Union economies, and direct investment in China as a share of their respective goss domestic products (GDP – the standard measure of an economy’s size). As is often the case, I use the numbers as percentages of their economies because they provide the context that the numbers themselves lack. And this practice is all the more important when trying to figure out matters like dependence or vulnerability.

Let’s start with the European Union’s two-way trade with China and use 2019 as the first year – since that’s the last full year before the arrival of the CCP Virus pandemic, which focused so much attention on over-reliance on China (or any single supplier) for products deemed unusually important. As can be seen, combined exports to and imports from the People’s Republic has grown much faster since 2019 than has the EU economy:

2019: 4.01

2020: 4.39

2021: 4.83

2022: 5.75

In fact, during this period, this trade relative to the EU economy expanded much faster than in the years before 2019. For example, in 2012, two-way Sino-EU goods trade already stood at 3.36 percent of the Union’s output.

(Both sets of figures are in euros before factoring in inflation. The 2012 and 2019-21 figures come from the reliable Statistia.com website here and here. The 2022 trade data come from Statistia. The 2022 GDP figure comes from taking the 2021 Statistia number and adding the 3.6 percent pre-inflation EU growth estimate provided by the Union’s statistical service Eurostat.)

Here’s how America’s annual bilateral goods trade with China as a share of the U.S. economy has changed from 2019 to 2022:

2019: 2.60

2020: 2.65

2021: 2.81

2022: 2.71

These percentages are up some during this period, but by much less than those for the EU. And in 2022, the share went down. Also of note: These numbers are lower in absolute terms than the EU’s. For comparison’s sake, the U.S. figure for 2012 was 3.30 percent. So the importance of China trade to the U.S. economy had been fading steadily before 2019, and has stabilized since. But may be declining once again. So the EU certainly looks like a laggard here.

(These U.S. pre-inflation trade and GDP data come from the standard Commerce Department sources.)

Turning to direct investment flows to China, here are the annual EU results as a percent of economic output:

2019: 0.05

2020: 0.04

2021: 0.03

2022: unavailable

Here, EU relations with China look to be decreasing. But one source pegs the 2021-22 increase at 92.5 percent – a near doubling! Since EU economic growth last year wasn’t remotely that strong, it’s possible that the Union’s businesses have just executed a major turnabout.

(The EU GDP data for 2019-21- this time in pre-inflation U.S. dollars – come from the World Bank. The 2022 figure comes from the St. Louis branch of the Federal Reserve.  The investment figures, also in in pre-inflation U.S. dollars  – including the claim of the big 2022 jump – come from the China-Briefing.com website.)

Their U.S. counterparts?

2019: 0.03

2020: 0.04

2021: 0.01

2022: 0.04

No clear trend here – but no evidence of a big recent pop. So let’s call this a draw at best. And overall edge to the United States.

(The 2019-21 investment and all the GDP data come from the Commerce Department.  The 2022 investment figure can be found in this New York Times piece.

Not that I’m completely thrilled with the U.S. performance. Except for the curbs on exports of goods and investments related to advanced semiconductors, the Biden administration seems wed to the notion that the United States can trim its China economic sails in a piecemeal fashion. But this approach suffers at least two major flaws.

First, as I’ve repeatedly argued, the threat from China is systemic. Therefore addressing product by product or industry by industry is likely to keep Washington straining to keep up with China’s progress.

Second, the piecemeal approach seems to assume that “strategic goods” exist in isolation, even though nearly all manufactured products are only the tip of a (yes, iceberg-like) supply chain.

In other words, if you want to boost America’s health security, you need to make sure that the domestic economy can not only turn out facemasks, but the materials from which they’re made, the machinery needed to manufacture them, and the parts and components of this equipment.

Does this mean that there’s no substitute for aiming to shut down economic relations completely, however gradual this effort may be to proceed? Doubtful, because so many of the goods supplied by China, like apparel and toys, are harmless (although their purchase does increase resources ultimately available to the Chinese regime).

But does it mean that much more energy and thought need to be applied to so-called “decoupling” by both the European Union and the United States? Undoubtedly.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Advice From a Genuine China Expert That’s Genuinely Useless

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China, espionage, fentanyl, globalism, Mel Books, national interests, Nicholas Kristof, opioids, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, privacy, spying, Thomas Hobbes, TikTok

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s column on how the United States can avoid war with China generated two big takeaways that jumped out at me right away:

First, although his knowledge of the People’s Republic is impressive (he and his wife deservedly won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on China’s democracy movement and its brutal suppression in Tiananmen Square), his foreign policy thinking can be dangerously childish for anyone primarily concerned with defending and promoting critical U.S. interests..

Second, this column is worth focusing on because such childishness has been all too typical of the globalist strategy that dominated U.S. foreign policymaking and thinking in the decades between the end of World War II and the advent of the Trump presidency.

The problems with Kristof’s column begin with the headline “How to Avoid a War with China” – which unlike many headlines, accurately reflects the main theme. This objective is troublesome because except for pacifists or those unconcerned about preserving acceptable levels of American political independence and prosperity, it can’t be the top priority for U.S. China policy or for any other dimension of U.S. foreign policy.

And in fact, it hasn’t been the nation’s top international priority for decades. That’s why Washington has long pledged to defend numerous treaty allies by threatening adversaries with nuclear attack in response to aggression. The domination of these allies by the Soviet Union and/or North Korea and/or China has been deemed an outcome worth endangering America’s physical survival.

It’s perfectly legitimate for Kristof or anyone else to question these priorities. I myself have opposed incurring nuclear war risk in any number of circumstances (most recently, on behalf of Ukraine, which in my view is of no intrinsic importance to U.S. safety, sovereignty, or prosperity).

But if Kristof or anyone else seeks to fold back some or all such American nuclear umbrellas based on cost-risk calculations demonstrating why various national security objectives (including, for example, America’s own independence) aren’t vital after all, or unless these critics are simply doctrinaire pacifists, they need to take one of two steps for the sake of full disclosure to their audiences and intellectual honesty.

They can either explain how the United States can achieve vital objectives without the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons. Or they can acknowledge that achieving such U.S. objectives regardless of risk isn’t their concern. Since Kristof hasn’t argued for any of these points, from this standpoint, it’s difficult to view his column as anything else but a simple expression of fear.

Except two points that Kristof has made exemplify one example of what I’ve long called a deepseated American failure – especially by generations of globalists in and out of government – to think of U.S. foreign policy as an exercise in promoting or defending specific interests at all. My first comprehensive stab at this argument came here.

And further research revealed to additional ways in which “interest-based” thinking was avoided, including that which Kristof demonstrates – which I called (not too catchily) a search for abstract standards for judging U.S. foreign policy decisions that are incapable in and of themselves of helping America cope with important challenges or capitalize on important opportunities

These standards can take many forms – i.e., advancing human rights or strengthening international institutions or promoting the economic development of low-income countries. The one that Kristof is pushing in his column seems to reflect the idea that it’s not legitimate (or doesn’t pass some more elemental smell test) for the United States to defend itself against or even object to any Chinese threats in spheres in which America’s record isn’t simon pure or outstandingly effective itself.

Yes, this sounds positively ditzy. But what other interpretation can be put on the following two passages?

>“I’m among those wary of TikTok because of the risk that it might be used for spying. But I also know that the United States has similarly used private businesses to spy on China. When China purchased a new Boeing 767 in 2000 to be the Chinese equivalent of Air Force One, American officials planted at least 27 bugs in it” and

>”I think the United States should press China harder on some issues, such as the reckless way Chinese companies export chemicals to Mexico that are turned into fentanyl. That Chinese-origin fentanyl kills many thousands of Americans each year, and it’s hard to see why the deaths of so many aren’t higher on the bilateral agenda.

“But we also need humility. America’s politicians, pharma companies and regulators themselves catastrophically bungled the opioid crisis. Why should we expect Chinese leaders to care more about young American lives than our own leaders do?”

Regarding the TikTok and spying point, sure Kristof professes concern about the Chinese app. But if his paramount aim is helping to prevent Beijing from jeopardizing the privacy of individual Americans, why mention America’s own espionage operations other than to foster the impression that they somehow excuse China’s? What else can this suggestion of moral equivalence accomplish?

I suppose that, in principle, Kristof (or someone else) could think that abstaining from some (or all?) U.S. spying on China might help the United States. Maybe by encouraging Beijing to reciprocate? But again, he never mentions how or why.

Someone prioritizing U.S. interests would recognize that the fact that Washington is “guilty” of the taking same kinds of actions that China carries out (along with every other country with such capabilities) is completely irrelevant to the imperative of defending Americans from its probes. That’s the only objective – or even subject of interest – that should matter to anyone concerned with this nation’s well-being.

Kristof makes a similar disclaimer about understanding the need to respond to the Chinese fentanyl ingredients threat. But then he introduces more distractions – namely (a) a call for humility because Washington has performed so miserably in dealing with opioid use; and (b) the suggestion that if U.S. leaders had cared more about their own people, China’s leaders would care about Americans more as well.

Let’s say, however, that President Biden publicly criticizes America’s opioid record. I’m a fan of humility. But exactly what purpose would such a statement serve? Awakening Americans to the dangers of opioids and/or to their own leaders’ incompetence and/or indifference? Spurring them to demand more effective domestic countermeasures? As if many Americans aren’t already angry about the crisis’ domestic roots and haven’t clamored for action?

Or perhaps Kristof believes that Beijing would be satisfied enough with the resultant propaganda victory to conclude that actively helping to kill so many Americans was no longer necessary? I can’t think of any other value that would be added to a public U.S. eating of humble pie. But again, he leaves this discussion hanging, too.

Or maybe Kristof is worried that if the Chinese sign some agreement, then U.S. leaders will believe that the fentanyl pressure is off them? He sort of indicates this at the end, with his contention that the United States can best fend off various Chinese threats by strengthening its own society and economy. And he’s certainly right about the need for better U.S. domestic policies. But would Washington really be let off the fentanyl hook until deaths fall dramatically? That’s doubtful, and in any event, the author’s analysis here is awfully skimpy.

But it’s distraction Number Two that’s more revealing, because, as with Kristof’s seeming views on spying, it raises the possibility that as long as Washington’s own anti-fentanyl measures haven’t reached some level of acceptability (in whose eyes? China’s?), it can’t reasonably expect Beijing to lend a helping hand…and perhaps shouldn’t even try changing Chinese policies?

I can’t say for sure that’s Kristof’s view. But even if current Chinese leaders ever would consider such a beneficial course of action under any foreseeable circumstance, it’s anything but clear here, either, why in Kristof’s view even mentioning the American fentanyl record matters. However lousy it’s been, shutting off the flow of precursors from China would indisputably help save American lives So this outcome should be pursued vigorously, period. Why muck up the issue with any other considerations?

It may seem that I’m calling emphatically for a foreign policy of double standards and of hypocrisy. But that would be missing the point. I’m arguing instead for anchoring America’s approach to the world first and foremost to the defense and advancement of specific, concrete national interests – that is, to no standards whatever except for whatever contributes to those goals.

As for the hypocrisy charge, I plead (as a Mel Brooks movie once memorably put it) “Incredibly guilty. Because in the kind of fundamentally Hobbesian world that I’m of course assuming, I’m perfectly fine with the United States resorting to methods whose use by others it opposes because I’m completely uninterested in creating or upholding norms to which all should adhere. I’m simply interesting in doing whatever’s necessary, whenever it’s necessary, for the United States to create advantage – of course subject to the approval at some point of the American people – and to ensuring that the nation retains the power to enable this approach to succeed.

This doesn’t rule out cooperation with other countries at various times on various subjects. And if the American people endorse such a course, it doesn’t even rule out U.S. efforts to conform with those non-interest-based, abstract standards of behavior. What it does rule out is making any of the above the alpha and omega of foreign policy. And if you believe that any other test should rule instead, let me know.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Thinking Straight About Ukraine and Taiwan

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Baltics, Biden, China, credibility, deterrence, extended deterrence, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, semiconductors, strategic ambiguity, Taiwan, Ukraine, Ukraine War, vital interests, Vladimir Putin

A flurry of developments in the last few days has underscored my frequently made and related points that

(a) America’s Ukraine policy is the height of recklessness because it’s courting any risk of nuclear war on behalf of a country whose fate it stlll doesn’t consider a vital interest; and

(b) the common claim that the best way to protect (genuinely vital) Taiwan is to beat help Kyiv defea Russia is nonsensical – and dangerously so precisely because of that nuclear war risk.

The evidence that Washington doesn’t view Ukraine as vital? Its continued refusal to admit it into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the longstanding U.S. security alliance. As explained repeatedly on RealityChek, for decades, the NATO allies have been protected not only by an American pledge to come to their defense whenever needed, but by a U.S. nuclear umbrella. This arrangement aimed at deterring attack by convincing potential aggressors that a such an assault on attack on any of them would trigger – if necessary – a response with the most destuctive weapons ever created and therefore their total annihilation.

And since the resulting nuclear conflict would threaten America’s very existence as well, this policy of “extended deterrence” was bolstered by the stationing of relatively small U.S. conventional forces directly in harm’s way. Their purpose – lending credibility to the American nuclear threat by leaving a President no choice but to push “the button” to save them in the likely event of their being overrun by a superior foe.

Given the literally existential stakes involved, U.S. leaders would need to be literally crazy to adopt such policies to defend countries whose loss would not pose literally mortal threats to American survival, independence, or prosperity. That’s why not every country on earth enjoys NATO-like protections.

But Ukraine lately has been a weird – and indeed absolutely perverse – exception. U.S. policy is clearly running some nuclear war risk – not by deploying any combat forces in the country (some auditors of weapons shipments are officially on the ground) but by deploying major forces in the immediate vicinity of a conflict that could well spill over borders and engage them.

At the same time, the United States still opposes admitting Ukraine as a NATO member and therefore extending to Kyiv that nuclear guarantee. Indeed, according to a Financial Times piece last Thursday, the Biden administration even opposes setting up a timetable for Ukrainian membership.

Reportedly, the main reason is fear of further provoking Russia, and increasing the odds of potentially catastrophic nuclear weapons use. But of course, if Ukraine is vital enough to be risking nuclear war already – due to the next-door military deployments – then what’s the problem? Would a NATO admissions announcement really worsen that risk materially?

If so, U.S. officials strangely haven’t made that argument. And if so, why is that even a consideration? When a truly vital interest is endangered, those are exactly the risks that by definition are worth running. In fact, when a truly vital interest is endangered, why not pour in U.S. forces to try turning the tide decisively?

Instead, the real reason is surely that U.S. leaders understand that Ukraine isn’t vital at all, but have decided to run not-trivial nuclear war risk anyway in hopes of threading a needle. I’m still waiting for a convincing explanation of why that strategy isn’t terrifyingly irresponsible.

One common answer: Preventing Russian success in Ukraine will best protect the nearby NATO countries – and at zero nuclear war risk because there would be no need for them to invoke the explicit nuclear guarantee they do enjoy.

That’s not a crazy argument. But this reasoning still leaves the United States in the bizarre (and needlessly dangerous) position of running non-trivial nuclear war risk to protect a non-vital country in order to avoid any nuclear war risk to protect countries that are deemed vital.

This argument is weird not least because – logically anyway – it credits the U.S. nuclear umbrella with little or no effectiveness. Why else would proponents believe that, having subdued a country with no explicit U.S. nuclear guarantee, Russia would inevitably attack a country with one? Along with tripwire forces?

This argument also ignores Russia’s failure to attack these very NATO countries. And it’s so far let them alone even though, especially in the case of the Baltic countries, they’re immediate Russian neighbors and in 1940 were officially absorbed into the old Soviet Union. They also contain big ethnic Russian  populations. That may not strike Russian dictator Vladimir Putin as an historical justification for re-gaining them as strong as that which he cites for Ukraine. But it’s still no doubt significant in his mind. It’s hard to avoid crediting the NATO nuclear guarantee for this success.

Which brings us to Taiwan. Unlike Ukraine, it’s genuinely vital to the United States. Unless you want to chance living in a world where China controls the global supply of semiconductors, and the technology needed to manufacture the most advanced versions of these chips. These rapidly improving devices are the building blocks of all the computing and communications systems central to the weapons that will soon dominate war-fighting, and of future innovation in the military and civilian worlds alike (including in artificial intelligence). Not so incidentally, increasingly advanced semiconductors will determine whether your privacy remains private.

Ukraine hawks of course insist that frustrating Russia there will help deter China from attacking Taiwan as well. And it’s true that Taiwan doesn’t enjoy a nuclear guarantee from the United States. It’s not even a formal treaty ally. But bilateral defense relations have recently moved much closer, and President Biden has several times promised that the United States will in fact move to defend the island against Beijing (see, e.g., here), removing much of the “strategic ambiguity” that has marked American policy for decades.

And these kinds of measures – which include a weekend statement from a Congressional Republican leader endorsing such actions, too – will deter China much more effectively than anything that happens in Ukraine for a very simple reason: Combined with such specific steps, and likely follow-ons, Taiwan very importance makes them credible.

With Ukraine, the opposite proposition obviously holds: Because it was never vital, U.S. efforts to prevent an invasion failed. For high stakes commitments to achieve low stakes goals are inherently non-credible.

Importantly, making grandiose promises to achieve transparently less-than-grandiose goals is no way to build or maintain credibility worldwide, either.  Instead, it’s much likelier to create or reenforce impressions of stupidity or pigheadedness – not good looks when last I checked.

The argument that going too far down the above Taiwan road needlessly creates too much risk can’t be dismissed out of hand. But even if it increases the odds of World War 3, because Taiwan is vital – and unless the word is meaningless –  going further down the road (including with symbolic gestures like the meeting in California between House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Taiwan’s president) can’t be ruled out, either.

Like so many foreign policy and national security questions, though, “how far” – and trying to thread that needle – is a matter for legitimate debate. But because Ukraine isn’t vital, assuming any nuclear risk on its behalf has been a foolhardy, potentially suicidal blunder. And indisputably so – at least for anyone without a death wish.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The U.S. Keeps Enabling European Free-Riding on Ukraine & Defense Generally

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allies, Biden, burden sharing, defense spending, EU, Europe, European Union, free-riding, Kiel Institute for the World Economy, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Ukraine, Ukraine War

Twenty-three years ago, I published an article (which you can download here) on defense burden-sharing in the America’s premier national security alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), titled “Promises, Promises.” I borrowed the title from a 1968 Broadway musical that was ultimately about cynically made pledges because I thought it was perfect for a study that documented how NATO’s European members kept welshing on their vows to raise their defense spending to serious levels – and how the real blame ultimately rested with an overly indulgent United States.

Twenty-three years later, the first major war in Europe since 1945 keeps dragging on, and fresh evidence makes clear (a) that the Europeans (both inside and outside NATO) remain defense deadbeats; and (b) that a prime reason remains their so-far-well-founded confidence that they can rely on the United States to pick up any slack.

Not that no burden-sharing progress has been made at all. As NATO itself just reported, seven members (including the United States) have now met the guideline of spending at least two percent of their national economic output on the military. That’s up from three in 2014.

Just three problems here. First, NATO has thirty members, meaning that the vast majority are still skimping on defense. Second, the two percent guideline was agreed to in 2014. Even had no Ukraine War broken out, that would be a pretty modest move in nine years. With a conflict raging in Europe itself, it’s minimal at best. And in fact, only one NATO country crossed that two percent threshhold since the Russian invasion – Lithuania, which is located awfully close to the war zone.

Third, the NATO guideline is just that – an aspiration, not a hard-and-fast promise, let alone something contained in a legally binding treaty. And reportedly, there’s scant enthusiasm among alliance members for raising it.

Of course, in this Ukraine War era, defense spending isn’t the only contribution that can be made to Europe’s security, and NATO isn’t the only grouping capable of helping out. But the widely followed “Ukraine Support Tracker” compiled by Germany’s Kiel Institute for the World Economy shows that after some brief, belated signs that countries in the European Union (EU – whose members contain both most NATO countries and others on the continent) were collectively stepping up with both military and mainly economic aid for Ukraine, these countries have begun slacking off again in relative terms.

As the Kiel analysts put in their February 21 update:

“Over 2022, the US led the way with major support decisions for Ukraine, with EU countries following with some delay and overtaking the US in the meantime with their total commitments. With additional data now collected (November 21 to January 15), the US again takes the lead.”

The specific numbers? “With additional pledges of nearly 37 billion euros in December, the Americans have earmarked a total of just over 73.1 billion euros for Ukraine support. For the EU, the comparable figure is 54.9 billion euros.”

My “Promises, Promises” article documented in detail that the European NATO members kept free-riding on the United States because Washington repeatedly all but told them that America’s commitment to Europe’s defense would remain unchanged whatever the allies did spending-wise.   

These days, President Biden has also essentially invited the Europeans to free ride by repeatedly declaring that the United States would stand with Ukraine against Russia’s aggression – as he expressed it most recently last month in Poland – “no matter what.”  

Foreign policy realists (a group that should include you as well as me) aren’t mainly bothered by the flagrant unfairness of this situation. As long as it’s tolerated by the United States, free-riding is arguably in the interests of the NATO allies – and ultimately that’s what realists believe foreign policymaking should be all about (though allied leaders might usefully ponder the possible limits of even American patience).     

Instead, the main concern is pragmatic. In the end, allies are worth having only if they can be counted on to join a fight if one breaks out. At the very least, how can any military engage in any useful planning without knowing what forces will be available? Allies like the NATO free-riders, which plainly aren’t ready to make significant sacrifices on behalf of common security during peacetime, seem anything but dependable in the event of hostilities. That’s something Mr. Biden urgently needs to think through before his Ukraine policy creates the acid test.        

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Biden Keeps Widening That Dangerous Lippmann Gap

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alliances, Biden administration, China, defense budget, Defense Department, inflation, Lippmann Gap, military, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, Taiwan, Trump administration, Ukraine, Ukraine War, Walter Lippmann

As made clear by its latest proposed defense budget, the Biden administration is creating an ever more serious Lippmann Gap problem – and courting greater and greater threats to U.S. national security in the process.

As known by RealityChek regulars, this term refers to a danger warned of by twentieth century philosopher and journalist Walter Lippmann – who argued that a country whose foreign policy objectives were exceeding the means at its disposal to achieve those objectives is headed for big trouble.

And practically since it entered office, that’s the fix into which Mr. Biden’s expansive foreign policy goals on the one hand, and his Pentagon budget requests on the other, keep sinking America. Worse, this year, the predicament seems especially worrisome, since the President is conducting foreign and national security policies that inevitably are super-charging tensions with both a nuclear-armed Russia and a nuclear-armed China.

No matter whether you believe either or both of these policies are necessary or not (and I view the Biden Ukraine/Russia policies as unforgivably reckless, because no vital U.S. interests are at stake, and his China policies unavoidable, because Taiwan’s semiconductor manufacturing prowess has turned it into a vital interest), you have to agree that fire is being played with.

This past week, the administration revealed that it will be asking Congress to approve $842 billion worth of spending on the Pentagon and its operations proper. (As usual, the annual defense budget request additionally includes tens of billions of dollars worth of extra spending, practically all on Energy Department programs for maintaining the country’s nuclear arsenal.)

It’s a lot of money. But it’s only 3.15 percent larger than the funds finally approved for the Defense Department for this current (2023) fiscal year. And when you factor in the administration’s estimate of inflation for 2024 (2.40 percent), in real terms, it’s barely an increase at all. Worse, if you believe that inflation might stay considerably higher, then we’re looking at a prospective defense budget cut in real terms.

Either the President believes that (1) the U.S. military can already handle both the threat of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan and a Ukraine War that might at least spill over into the territory of treaty allies; or (2) that neither event will happen; or (3) that they’ll be spaced out neatly enough to enable existing U.S. forces to handle them one at a time; or (4) that a marginally bigger defense budget will at least put the Pentagon on the road toward building the capabilities it needs to handle these new potential threats before they actually materialize.

Do any of these strike you as safe enough bets?

Nor is this type of Biden administration defense budget request anything new. Last year at about this time, the fiscal 2023 Pentagon budget request was unveiled. `As you may recall, “last year at about this time” was roughly a month after Russia invaded Ukraine, and after President Biden resolved to help Kyiv turn back Moscow’s forces. He ruled out using American boots on the ground, but began providing major military assistance and significantly adding to the U.S. military presence in countries throughout Europe – including those right next to Ukraine that Washington had already promised to protect with nuclear weapons if necessary because (unlike Ukraine), they’re members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

In addition, since the previous August, the President had stated several times that the U.S. military would come to Taiwan’s rescue if Beijing attacked. Even though the White House has sought to walk back these comments, their number plainly means that the United States has taken on another sizable defense commitment.

But that fiscal 2023 budget request – again, made in March, 2022 – sought only 4.2 percent more in defense spending than was finally approved for fiscal 2022. And after the administration’s expected inflation rate expected, the rise was only 1.5 percent.

Further, Mr. Biden’s first defense budget request (for fiscal 2022), made in April, 2021, sought Pentagon spending that was only 1.6 percent higher than that finally approved for the final Trump administration budget year.

It’s true that this modest Biden request was much bigger than the proposal made by his predecessor for fiscal 2022. But it seemed way too paltry given that at the heart of Mr. Biden’s approach to foreign policy was the promise that America would come charging “back” from four Trump years of alleged retreat from the world stage and in particular neglect of defense alliances.

Of course, defense budget requests are only the first step in the defense spending process, and Congress will surely push through some increases as it’s done in years past. Also crucial to remember: The amount of military spending doesn’t automatically translate into more or less fighting prowess, since spending priorities within the top-line outlay can be and often are shifted to generate more bang for the buck (or achieve other newly added objectives). Indeed, that’s what one aim that the President says he’s aiming to achieve.

Nonetheless, the overall initial budget request certainly limits the extent to which specific programs can absorb more funds without overly shortchanging other important programs. It also tends to exert a gravitational effect on Congress’ political ability to add (or subtract).

Two other big problems to worry about. First, the latest inflation estimates by the Pentagon have been way off. For the 2022-23 calendar year, the actual inflation rate has so far turned out to be nearly three times greater (nearly six percent as of February) than the estimate for that fiscal year (2.2 percent).

The estimate for 2023-24 of 2.4 percent roughly matches the latest forecasts of the Federal Reserve and the Congressional Budget Office. But as noted, even if correct, the extra outlays will be minimal in after-inflation terms, as I’ve argued previously, politicians’ great temptation to stimulate the economy with all sorts of giveaways as a new presidential election cycle gets underway could well keep price increases robust.

Second, decisions to spend even much more on, for example, new weapons or troop readiness can take years to result in more effective forces. So even much bigger Biden requests were never going to work instant miracles.

At the same time, the global threat environment is hardly moving at a snail’s pace. And recent reporting from The Wall Street Journal describes what a mammoth strategic transition the Defense Department needs to make – from a force focused on fighting a Middle East-centric global war on terror to one able to handle two great power threats.

The option that I’d prefer is for closing the Lippmann Gap by reducing some U.S. defense commitments (principally relating to Ukraine, along with further downplaying the Middle East) along with hiking military spending faster (to cope with the mounting Chinese threat to Taiwan). But at the rate the Biden administration is going, America’s worrisome mismatch between its foreign policy reach and its grasp seems sure to keep worsening.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: On Chinese Spying and Dual Loyalties

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academics, Biden administration, China, China Initiative, Chinese Americans, civil liberties, DOJ, dual loyalty, espionage, FBI, German-Americans, higher education, immigrants, Israel, Italian-Americans, Japanese internment, Japanese-Americans, Jews, Justice Department, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, profiling, spying, students, The New York Times, World War II, Yudhijit Bhattacharjee

As an American Jew, I’m extremely aware of the dangers of accusing members of various U.S. identity groups with ancestry from or associated with foreign countries of “dual loyalties.” The worst example of the injustices that can result was the World War II-era internment policy – which punished legal immigrants and even American citizens simply based on the assumption that anyone of Japanese descent could be spying for a wartime enemy.

(German- and Italian-Americans came under suspicion, too, but were placed in camps much more selectively than Japanese-Americans.)

Especially in the U.S. context, the dual loyalty charges levelled against Jews has come from those who claim that when they lobby for or just favor pro-Israel policies, they’re prioritizing the interests of the Jewish State over those of the United States. (For some typical – and unusual – recent examples see here.)

More recently, individuals of Chinese descent living in America have come under the microscope due to concerns about wide-ranging spying campaigns conducted by the People’s Republic. And because the targets have ranged from U.S. citizens to legal immigrants to Chinese nationals resident here as students and on various academic exchange programs, critics have claimed that racial profiling and dual loyalty overreach have marked the responses of American law enforcement agencies.

Indeed, these charges – along with contentions that valuable scientific progress is at risk – have been so persuasive to the Biden administration that last February, it shut down a Justice Department program begun during the Trump years to cope with the alleged threat.

But as a New York Times Magazins article today has made clear, despite the dangers of broad-brush approaches, something like the Justice Department’s disbanded “China Initiative” is absolutely necessary to safeguard U.S. national security adequately.

As explained in this detailed Times report on the FBI’s China-related counter-espionage work (and it’s worth quoting in full):

“…China has sought to exploit the huge numbers of people of Chinese origin who have settled in the West. The Ministry of State Security, along with other Chinese government-backed organizations, spends considerable effort recruiting spies from this diaspora. Chinese students and faculty members at American universities are a major target, as are employees at American corporations. The Chinese leadership ‘made the declaration early on that all Chinese belong to China, no matter what country they were born or living’ in, James Gaylord, a retired counterintelligence agent with the F.B.I., told me. ‘They started making appeals to Chinese Americans saying there’s no conflict between you being American and sharing information with us. We’re not a threat. We just want to be able to compete and make the Chinese people proud. You’re Chinese, and therefore you must want to see the Chinese nation prosper.’

“Stripped of its context and underlying intent, that message can carry a powerful resonance for Chinese Americans and expatriates keen to contribute to nation-building back home. Not all can foresee that their willingness to help China could lead them to break American laws.”

Keep in mind, moreover, that Times reporter Yudjhijit Bhattacharjee is by no means unsympathetic to the profiling and dual loyalty issues, as he wrote in the very next sentence,

“An even more troubling consequence of China’s exploitation of people it regards as Chinese is that it can lead to the undue scrutiny of employees in American industry and academia, subjecting them to unfair suspicions of disloyalty toward the United States.”

But however – genuinely – troubling they are, if you’re worried about Chinese spying and national security, and you acknowledge that much of Beijing’s strategy is based on an attempt to blur the distinction between Chinese nationals and Chinese-Americans, and that the latter can be all too susceptible to these appeals, what’s the alternative to casting a wide net? Pretending that there’s nothing to see here?

Which brings up another disturbing finding of Bhattacharjee’s: The claim of one FBI agent he interviewed that “When… agents go out to talk to companies and universities about the threat…skeptical listeners ask for the evidence that proves the theft of trade secrets is part of a campaign directed by China’s government.”

Given unmistakable evidence of decades of massive Chinese theft of U.S. and other foreign intellectual property, China’s systematic disregard for other long agreed-on global trade rules it’s promised to respect, and its increasingly hostile and expansionist foreign policies, what aside from willful ignorance – or on the part of universities, a naive faith that even a regime so repressive and belligerent would never dream of corrupting the global March of Science – could explain this skepticism?

Obviously no country with what I called yesterday a healthy sense of self-preservation could possibly base its China counter-espionage policies on such assumptions. Nor could any country with inevitably limited national security resources and a consequent need to set priorities.

So even though critics of the China Initiative were right in pointing out that some of those it had prosecuted have been acquitted, and even though that danger of overreach is always present, the Biden administration was seriously mistaken in not only closing down the China Initiative but sanctimoniously declaring that it’s completely scrapping any practices smacking of “standards based on race or ethnicity.”

And if China Initiative critics want to boost the odds of counter-espionage campaigns choosing their targets accurately, they might try getting their own heads out of the sand by helping the government less reluctantly and scrutinizing their own China ties with more realistically and vigiliantly.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Beyond Blaming the Victim

Tags

CCP Virus, China, coronavirus, COVID 19, Edward G. Luce, Financial Times, George W. Bush, global terrorism, Iraq war, lab leak, Mario del Poro, Melvyn Leffler, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, September 11, The Washington Post, weapons of mass destruction, Wuhan lab, Wuhan virus

When a line of argument appears twice in Mainstream Media publications on consecutive days, it’s hard not to conclude that a trend might be forming – or has been well underway. And when it comes to the particular line of argument I’m posting about, that’s disturbing news, since it’s an especially repugnant form of blaming the victim that could become dangerously influential. For these views can all too easily become rationales for official paralysis in the face of major threats, or excessively feeble responses, because the media organizations spreading these views are still taken so seriously by so many U.S. policymakers.

The first example of such blaming the victim comes from Edward G. Luce, a columnist for the Financial Times. Now before you go objecting that both this pundit and his newspaper are British, keep in mind that the author is based in Washington, D.C. and that the Times has long published a U.S. edition that’s must reading in high level American policy circles that are by no means confined to business and economics.

In his March 1 offering on how some revised American intelligence assessments of the CCP Virus lab leak theory might impact U.S.-China relations, Luce worries that “America’s growing tendency to demonise China — and the fact that China keeps supplying it with material — poses a threat to global health” and could poison the entire spectrum of bilateral ties because “The world’s superpower and its rising great power are both now working from home and nourishing paranoia about each other.”

It’s the first half of this analysis that especially caught my eye. According to Luce, practically the entire U.S. political system is increasingly “demonising” China – phrasing that, along with the follow-on reference to “paranoia,” can only mean that U.S. positions on the entire range of Sino-American relations have become unjustifiably harsh.

But at the same time, he notes that “China keeps supplying [Americans] with material.” That sounds like a confession that China’s record actually does warrant more confrontational stances in Washington. Luce’s contention of mutual paranoia stoking, however, indicates that this isn’t what he believes at all.

Practically identical is Luce’s observation that “Beijing’s reluctance to play global citizen on pandemic warning systems — on top of climate change and other common threats — means we are hearing far less from Washington about co-operating with China and far more about confronting it.”

Yet how is Luce advising the United States to deal with a country that he himself believes isn’t buying the argument about the need for cooperation on issues of common concern? Simply, it seems, by talking as much as ever or even more about “co-operating with China” – which appears to reflect the hope that some particularly inspiring official U.S. verbiage can bring Beijing around and of course a clear triumph over experience.

The second example of such victim blaming came in a book review published the following day in the Washington Post. Writing about American historian Melvyn Leffler’s new study of the 2003 U.S. Iraq War, French political scientist Mario del Pero describes Leffler as arguing that President George W. Bush and his top advisors

“were imbued with a ‘sense of exceptional goodness and greatness’ and believed in the superiority of ‘America’s system of democratic capitalism.’ This hubris encouraged a strategy that favored deploying America’s overwhelming power to protect the country and its way of life. The terrorist attacks fed this arrogance and blinded the administration to the moral and strategic issues it confronted.”

Leave aside the suggestion that belief in the superiority of “America’s system of democratic capitalism” is ipso facto a sign of “hubris” and “arrogance” (which strikes me as weird) and the contention that the Bush administration underestimated “the moral and strategic issues it confronted” (more persuasive IMO, especially the strategic part).

Concentrate instead on the final sentence about the September 11 attacks “feeding” the administration’s “arrogance.” This sounds just like Luce’s portrayal of over-the-top U.S. responses to Chinese provocations that he concedes in the next breath have been awfully provocative. Unless American leaders post-September 11 should have viewed that day’s strikes as a one-off?

Yet del Pero makes clear that Leffler makes no such argument. The author (in del Pero’s words) maintains that

>U.S. leaders “believed that America’s way of life was under threat”;

>”The shared assumption — within the administration as well as among allies and arms-control experts — was that Iraq still had secret weapons-of-mass-destruction (WMD) programs. The new global landscape made the possibility of a WMD-armed Iraq all the more ominous”; and

>“No threat [Leffler’s words] worried Bush and his advisers more than the prospect of terrorists getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction.”

Finally, (back to the reviewer’s words) “Intelligence was inconclusive and some of it, it was later realized, simply fabricated. But no risks could be taken.”

In other words, even though this second Iraq War turned out terribly, the idea that the dangers of global terrorism “fed” a Bush administration “arrogance” and “hubris” that presumably was already bloated is far too dismissive. Instead, the grievous damage already done by such terrorism, the genuinely frightful and plausible prospect of more to come – and possibly sooner rather than later – and the frustrating uncertainties policymakers always face in crises, mean that the 2003 invasion is best seen as an understandable and entirely rational response.

In fact, reviewer del Pero winds up substantially agreeing, calling Bush’s approach “coherent in theory.” Also worth keeping in mind. At least rhetorically, Bush didn’t start out as a chest-thumping foreign policy President.

In his October 11, 2000 debate with Democratic rival Al Gore during his first campaign for President, Bush stated:

“If we’re an arrogant nation [other countries will] resent us. If we’re a humble nation, but strong, they’ll welcome us. And our nation stands — stands alone right now in the world in terms of power. And that’s why we’ve got to be humble and yet project strength in a way that promotes freedom.”

Obviously, September 11 produced a change. But how could it not have, to at least some extent?

A famous bit of French snark memorably “complains” “This animal is dangerous. When attacked, it defends itself.” That’s a good way to think about both these charges that there’s something as fundamentally diseased about the overall American body politic’s reactions to the burgeoning threats posed by China as there was about the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq.

Of course, although some policies will always be rooted in real paranoia, and although their more reasoned counterparts can always go awry for any number of reasons, the failure of Luce, del Pero, and apparently Leffler (along with their Financial Times and Washington Post editors) to recognize a healthy sense of national self-preservation that’s vital in a dangerous world when they see it, is pretty diseased itself. Here’s hoping it doesn’t become epidemic.