Making News: New National Interest Article on Why the Foreign Policy Establishment Was Always Overrated

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academia, Afghanistan, alliances, Blob, Bretton Woods, China, Cold War, foreign policy establishment, forever wars, global financial crisis, globalism, Iran, liberal global order, Mainstream Media, Making News, Max Boot, Richard Haass, Soviet Union, The National Interest, think tanks

I’m pleased to announce that The National Interest has just published my latest article for an outside publication: an essay on why recent defenses of America’s bipartisan globalist foreign policy establishment (AKA, “The Blob”) wouldn’t hold any water even if this powerful, durable in-crowd hadn’t botched practically everything about Afghanistan. Here’s the link.

Also, a new twist today: Unfortunately, I thought some of the edits undermined the flow of the piece. I’m going to try to get at least some of them corrected. But in the meantime, to show careful readers what they were, I’m presenting below the draft as I sent it off. Let me know if you think I have some grounds for grousing. (P.S. I’m just fine with their title and love the subhead’s reference to the “poisoned well”!)

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

Why the Blob Really Has Been Unimpressive

by Alan Tonelson

So the Blob is starting to fight back. The bipartisan globalist national foreign policy establishment is being blamed both for President Biden’s hellaciously botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, and (including by the Blob-y Mr. Biden himself), for pushing the transformation of a necessary anti-terrorist operation into a naively grandiose nation-building project.

It’s time, the argument goes, to marginalize – or at least view more skeptically – this hodgepodge of former diplomats and Congressional aides, retired military officers, genuine academics, and think tank hacks that has shaped American diplomacy in two critical ways: by being used as the main personnel pool for staffing presidential administrations and House and Senate offices on rotating bases, and for serving up informal advisers for these politicians; and by dominating the list of sources used by overwhelmingly sympatico Mainstream Media journalists to report and interpret the news, and thus define for the public which foreign policy ideas are and aren’t legitimate to discuss.

“Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater!” Blob-ers are responding.

“The foreign policy establishment did get it wrong in Iraq, where the U.S. overreached,” allowed Richard Haass, who as President of the Council on Foreign Relations would arguably win a contest for Blob-er-in-Chief. “We got it wrong in Libya, we got it wrong in Vietnam. But over the last 75 years, the foreign policy establishment has gotten most things right.”

Washington Post pundit (and neoconservative apostate) Max Boot similarly has declared that “we can confidently say that, overall, the foreign policy establishment has served America well over the past 76 years.”

In other words, look past not only Afghanistan and Libya and Iraq and Vietnam but also the failure to anticipate the September 11 terrorist attack; and the long-time cluelessness about the emergence of security and economic threats from China (following the stubborn, decades-long determination to antagonize China after 1949); and a peacekeeping debacle in Somalia; and the Bay of Pigs fiasco; and the blind loyalty to an Iranian Shah hated by nearly all his subjects. Focus instead on all the – presumably more important – successes. (I’m excluding the numerous Blob-y decisions to back all manner of dictators, primarily in the developing world, and ignore human rights considerations because whatever their ethical flaws, only the Vietnam and Iran policies undermined American interests significantly.)

Paramount among them: victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War; the protectorate-alliances, foreign aid, and open trading system that keyed this triumph – in the process pacifying and democratizing Germany and Japan – fostering recovery in these former enemy dictatorships as well as the rest of Western Europe; and ushering in decades of record prosperity in these regions.

One obvious rejoinder: Today’s Blob and its most recent forerunners merit zero credit for those achievements because almost none of its members simply weren’t around or in power then. Meaning maybe America simply needs a more competent Blob?

At the same time, there’s inevitably been personnel continuity in the Blob’s ranks over time (think of recently deceased centenarian George Shultz, and the 98-year old Henry Kissinger, both still influential well into their golden years). Moreover, today’s establishment was largely groomed in Blob-y institutions, claims to be acting in that original Blob-y tradition, and has clearly remained stalwart in its advocacy of tireless international activism, and support for what it calls the liberal global order and its constituent institutions created by the older Blob generation. As a result, including those decades-old developments in judgements of today’s Blob is eminently defensible.

And in retrospect, what’s particularly revealing but neglected about these achievements is the extent to which they stemmed from circumstances almost ideally suited for foreign policy success, rather than from Blob-er genius. Globalists of the first post-World War II decades unquestionably faced serious domestic political obstacles to breaking with the country’s historic aloofness to most non-Western Hemispheric developments.

But they also enjoyed enviable advantages. Especially important was global economic predominance, which blunted much criticism on the home front by permitting subsidization of both the security and well-being of enormous foreign populations without apparent cost to American living standards or national finances.

It’s no coincidence, therefore, that as this advantage eroded, and the core Blob tactic of handling problems literally by throwing money at them and refusing to choose meaningfully between guns and butter became more problematic, the Blob’s record worsened – and undercut the intertwined domestic political and economic bases of active and passive public support for its strategies.

In fact, post-Vietnam, it’s difficult to identify any important foreign policy decision that Blob-y leaders have gotten right, or even handled reasonably well, with the exception of the first Persian Gulf War. (Ronald Reagan’s dramatic military buildup certainly helped spend and innovate the Soviets into collapse, but it was opposed by much and possibly most of the Blob, which favored continued containment and the simultaneous pursuit of arms control and detente.)

Just as important, this Blob’s very profligacy meant that many of its biggest post-Vietnam failures were economic in nature. Two leading examples – the messy collapse of the early World War II international monetary system and structural inflation and long sluggish growth that followed; and the 2007-09 global financial crisis and ensuing Great Recession.

Both crises were brought on fundamentally by global financial imbalances stemming from the Blob-ers’ stubborn refusal to support even minimal budget discipline on the foreign policy side; and from their failure to require reciprocal market access for traded goods either in the early post-World War II Bretton Woods monetary system or into its patchwork successors. And both revealed the Blob’s obliviousness to the intertwined imperatives of maintaining the national economic power needed to pay for their preferred policies responsibly; and of defining U.S. interests realistically enough to avoid needless costs and addiction to debt, inflation, or both.

Do today’s attacks, then, mean that the Blob’s demise is in sight? Not nearly likely enough. After all, it’s survived its decades-long string of blunders with its status pretty much intact. It’s bound to be keep being replenished by the same elite universities whose relevant faculty members are overwhelmingly Blob-y themselves. There’s no sign that their corporate funders are backing away from the think tanks that keep its many of its members employed when they’re out of public office. And its record will surely keep being reported principally by a news media that’s thoroughly Blob-y itself. That – frighteningly – leaves a foreign policy catastrophe inflicting lasting damage on the nation as America’s best hope for replacing the Blob even with simply a more genuinely diverse source of experience and expertise.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Will the Foreign Policy Experts – Finally – Start Learning Some Geography?

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Afghanistan, Biden, Blob, Bloomberg.com, CNN.com, Europe, geography, globalism, Jeremy Shapiro, Luke McGee, Mainstream Media, Marc Champion, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Robert D. Kaplan, The Economist

I’m thrilled to report that I may have jumped the gun in my post last Wednesday in scoffing at the possibility of President Biden’s botched Afghanistan withdrawal – and the broader U.S. failure in that Forever War – would resulting in any major changes in America’s needlessly risky and costly globalist approach to foreign policy.

I’m not saying that the two-decade Afghanistan fiasco and its humiliating final chapter will spur a search for real alternatives in the foreseeable future, or even that significant new strategies will ever be put into effect – at least not without a much bigger disaster reflecting the same kinds of mistakes. But it’s nonetheless remarkable not only that any unconventional idea has appeared – especially given the determination of the strongly globalist Mainstream Media to suppress them – but that the one that has surfaced challenges the root assumption of globalism.

Specifically, some establishment voices are, inchoately to be sure, pointing out that for all the worries understandably expressed by Americans about new threats to their security appearing in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, Europe faces much greater threats. The reason, moreover, is that it’s located much closer to Afghanistan than the United States.

In other words, geography counts, and America’s position halfway around the world from this troubled region and its utterly dysfunctional Middle East neighborhood, and separated from them and from its leading adversaries by wide oceans, is a leading contributor to its security that creates options enjoyed by no other major power.

Further, by implication – given that these points are being made in the context of the United States concluding that a Taliban victory in Afghanistan is acceptable after all – one of the most important of these options when many forms of trouble arise in any number of locales abroad is simple non-involvement.

The importance of America’s unique geography and its advantages may seem screamingly obvious. But as I’ve explained in detail (see, e.g., here and here), it has not only been ignored by generations of globalist American leaders and thinkers literally since Pearl Harbor. It’s been actively rejected.

Instead, the prevailing foreign policy conventional wisdom has consistently held that peace and security around the world make up a seamless whole, and that war and aggression and even instability anywhere across the globe are matters of urgent concern to the United States and must be squelched or resisted ASAP lest they mestastasize and directly endanger the American homeland.

Some of these “Geography matters”-type statements have been made by members of America’s most prominent and influential proponents of universal and open-ended foreign policy activism – the so-called Blob. This Washington, D.C.-centered bipartisan agglomeration of globalist former diplomats and Congressional aides, retired military officers, genuine academics, and think tank hacks shapes American diplomacy in two critical ways.

First, it represents the main personnel pool drawn on to staff presidential administrations and House and Senate offices on rotating bases, and also serves as key informal sources of advice for these politicians. In other words, it’s a central portion of what’s often called the “permanent bureaucracy” (and by some, the “Deep State”), whose combination of experience (which of course has unmistakable value), sheer staying power, and skill at projecting an air of authority (which clearly have much less intrinsic value) enables it often to steer policy independent of what elected officials favor – and especially to keep the status quo alive through inertia-reenforcing foot-dragging and even sabotage.

Second, the Blob powerfully influences what so many Americans read, hear, and see about foreign policy by dominating the list of sources used by Mainstream Media journalists (who are predominantly sympatico by virtue of shared elite educations and clubby intertwined social networks) to report and interpret the news. The resulting permeation of reporting and analysis with Blob-y globalist perspectives goes far toward defining for the public which foreign policy ideas are and aren’t legitimate to discuss.

That’s why I was so gobsmacked when Blob mainstay Robert D. Kaplan wrote in the (ardently globalist British magazine) The Economist that

“America is a vast and wealthy continent densely connected by navigable rivers and with an economy of scale, accessible to the main sea lines of communication, yet protected by oceans from the turmoil of the Old World.

“And that geography still matters, despite technology having shrunk the globe….”

As a result, Kaplan added that “geography helps explain why America can miscalculate and fail in successive wars, yet completely recover, unlike smaller and less well-situated countries which have little margin for error.” Moreover, logically speaking (and these are my views, not Kaplan’s), the very geography-grounded security that enables the United States to recover quickly from (at least most) foreign involvements that produce disastrous consequences means that it was never significantly vulnerable to the perceived threats that led to that involvement to begin with.

Similar opinions have been offered by former senior U.S. official Jeremy Shapiro, who argues that post-Afghanistan, the United States “can and will work effectively with allies, but only when its vital interests are at stake. It sees those interests in the competition with China. Increasingly, however, in places such as central Asia, the Sahel, and perhaps even Europe’s eastern neighbourhood, it does not.”

By contrast, he observed, “Europeans have more direct interests at stake in those places.”

Further, some Mainstream Media journalists have followed suit – providing further evidence that such once utterly heretical notions are now being bandied about in some Blob-y circles.

For example, Bloomberg.com‘s Marc Champion has contended that

“The U.S. left Afghanistan on Tuesday humbled and with few of its goals achieved after 20 years of war. For America’s European allies, the humiliation may just be starting.

“Connected to Afghanistan by land, unlike the U.S., for Europe the return of the Taliban presents more concrete threats. Those include not just terrorism but also mass migration and the heroin trade.”

More vividly, a recent CNN.com post was headlined, “Europe left exposed as Biden walks America away from the world stage.” It seems reasonable to infer that if the headline writer – and his editors – regarded America as exposed, too, they’d have mentioned that danger explicitly. Indeed, correspondent Luke McGee went on to report that “Multiple European officials and diplomats told CNN of their shock at Biden’s assertion that the only US interest in Afghanistan was to neutralize the terrorists who attacked the US in 2001 and prevent further attacks on American soil.

“They now fear the humanitarian and political consequences of mass migration from a country run by militants who’ve historically harbored terrorists and that is connected to mainland Europe by land” – unlike, I’d remind again, the United States.

Again, I’m not saying that an intellectual revolution in U.S. foreign policy is on the horizon. But as suggested above, only a few weeks ago, I couldn’t have imagined seeing so many examples of any of the above in so short a timespan.

On balance, I’m still convinced that the Blob will wind up stamping out such dissent, at least within its own ranks – if only because at the end of the day, so few would be employable in a truly post-globalist America. But many Blob-ers are also savvy enough to recognize a potentially sinking ship. So I feel pretty confident in predicting that the longer lousy headlines and optics keep emanating from Afghanistan, the more of these globalists will start appreciating the virtues of America’s geography.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Out of the Mouths of Generals

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alliances, America First, Associated Press, Blob, China, deterrence, globalism, Jim Mattis, Joe Biden, Mark Milley, North Korea, nuclear umbrella, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Poland, South Korea, Soviet Union, tripwires, Trump

Here’s one that genuinely justifies that over-used term, “You can’t make this up.”

Practically ever since President Trump assumed office, his globalist foreign policy critics have been attacking his claims that maintaining the status quo with U.S. security alliances couldn’t be a top priority of American foreign and national security policy. In this vein, they contemptuously derided as “transactional” his belief that rather than viewing these arrangements as vital ends in and of themselves, Washington needed continuously to make sure that they were creating at least as many benefits as problems for the nation.

Indeed, fetishizing alliances was so deeply embedded in the consciousness of the globalist bipartisan U.S. foreign policy Blob that Jim Mattis, the retired Marine Corps General who served as the first Trump Secretary of Defense, based his resignation largely on the argument that the President did not share his “core belief…that our strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships.”

So imagine my surprise upon reading an Associated Press story Thursday reporting that U.S. Army General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff (the nation’s top military office), has recommended that Washington – obviously meaning the probably incoming Biden administration – should reconsider “permanently positioning U.S. forces” overseas in instances where these servicemen and women are not actively engaged in combat.

Now it’s true that Milley, at least reportedly, was never especially tight with Mattis in particular. But in this age of political generals and admirals, he couldn’t have risen through the ranks this high had he dissented significantly from the globalist line. And Milley has spoken of the need for U.S. alliances in pretty urgent terms himself.

But there he was this past week, giving a speech on the future of warfare that not only called for more selectivity in creating and maintaining an American military footprint abroad, but basing this proposal largely on his unhappiness – and this is the real shocker – that the so-called forward deployment of these units has usually been accompanied by the families of soldiers, sailors, and airmen, and therefore places them in harm’s way.

His position is a shocker because, as I’ve explained before, stationing spouses and children so vulnerably has been a linchpin of globalist strategy toward alliances. They play a crucial role in turning the units they’re linked with into genuine tripwires – forces whose likelihood of defeat at the hands of much larger and stronger invaders like the Soviets or the North Koreans would give an American President little choice but to use nuclear weapons to avert disaster.

Of course, this approach didn’t stem from itchy nuclear trigger fingers in Washington. Quite the opposite: The working assumption was that the high probability of U.S. nuclear weapons use would deter conventional military aggression to begin with. And the probability that their attacks would wind up killing American non-combatants as well as troops was seen as an even stronger forcing event for nuclear weapons use – a situation that, in strategic parlance, would make this contingency more credible, thereby further inhibiting (or, again using strategy-ese, deterring) enemies from striking.

Skeptical? This is exactly why countries like Poland have been urging recent American Presidents to replace the policy of rotating various U.S. units in and out of their lands with big, permanent deployments. And weirdly and alarmingly, Mr. Trump has taken some steps in this direction.

I’ve concluded that, although the creation of such so-called nuclear umbrellas was defensible during the Cold War, when it was used to protect genuinely vital regions like Western Europe and Japan, and when its use in Asia was aimed at prospective foes that lacked nuclear retaliatory forces, it’s recklessly dangerous today. For the Soviet Union is an increasingly distant memory, many major U.S. allies are amply capable of their own defense, Asian adversaries have become able to strike the American homeland with their own nuclear weapons, and the security of South Korea in particular is no longer crucial for the United States’ own safety and well-being (as opposed to Taiwan, which, as I’ve recently argued, has moved into this category because of its world-class semiconductor manufacturing capability).

Not even the America First-y President Trump has gone remotely this far in actually changing U.S. alliance policy. Yet there was Milley, including in his remarks the statement that if war came with North Korea, “we would have a significant amount of non-combatant U.S. military dependents in harm’s way….I have a problem with that.”

The General didn’t make the needed follow-on case that the presence of these civilians has turned these alliances into “transmission belts of war” that could easily go nuclear and bring on the incineration of entire American cities. But an administration that followed his recommendations would greatly reduce this unnecessary potential danger.

So whether Milley recognizes the full implications of his stance or not, all Americans should hope that he keeps pushing this position as he continues as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs past Inauguration Day, and that even some of the globalist enthusiasts of the Biden administration start listening.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Globalism on Steroids on the Way for America?

Tags

alliances, America First, Antony Blinken, Blob, Cold War, containment, Foreign Affairs, George F. Kennan, globalism, international institutions, Joe Biden, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Trump

I’ve written at length on how President Trump has conducted a foreign policy that follows America First principles unevenly at best. Now the evidence is growing that if Joe Biden becomes President, he’ll pursue a strategy that will look like globalism on steroids – in other words, an approach certain to return the nation to a diplomacy that minimizes or ignores completely America’s unique advantages on the world stage, maximizes its vulnerabilities, and needlessly increases its exposure to danger.

Aside from Biden’s own strongly globalist impulses, the main evidence so far is the news that he’s decided to appoint longtime aide Antony Blinken as his Secretary of State. Practically all you need to know about this Washington foreign policy veteran, his priorities, and the almost congenitally globalist worldview from which they spring was summed up in this New York Times headline: “Biden Chooses Antony Blinken, Defender of Global Alliances, as Secretary of State.”

For those still doubting his hallmark, The Times stressed in its homepage subhead that, “Mr. Blinken is expected to try to re-establish the U.S. as a trusted ally ready to rejoin international agreements” – which had the added virtue of making clear that Blinken (along with Biden) is thinking not only about America’s security arrangements with Europe and East Asian countries, but about the entire raft of international institutions ranging from the United Nations to the World Trade Organization.

As I’ve explained, this globalist obsession with multilateralism overlooks (1) the potential of the security alliances in particular to plunge the United States into nuclear war for stakes far less than vital; and (2) America’s matchless overall capabilities and potential to achieve security and prosperity in an inevitably unstable, dangerous world through its own power, favored geographic position, and wealth, rather than by making quixotic attempts to pacify the international environment.

At least as worrisome, Blinken seems utterly oblivious to the importance of cultivating and wielding national power when international arrangements of various kinds do offer advantages to the United States. No one could reasonably disagree with his recent observation that

“Simply put, the big problems that we face as a country and as a planet, whether it’s climate change, whether it’s a pandemic, whether it’s the spread of bad weapons — to state the obvious, none of these have unilateral solutions. Even a country as powerful as the United States can’t handle them alone.”

You’ll search in vain, however, for any awareness that the multilateral solutions in which he places so much stock will have content. As a result, countries with different strengths and weaknesses, with differing histories and social and economic priorities will be pushing for outcomes likely to differ significantly from those optimal for America. So achieving those optimal outcomes is fanciful without the leverage to compel or to bribe, or some combination of the two.

But there’s another maxim of globalism possibly exemplified by Blinken (and other likely Biden appointees) that’s potentially even more dangerous for the United States. It’s the notion that striving for and achieving triumphs in the international arena are much nobler as well as much more important endeavors than seeking success in domestic affairs. Indeed, globalists have become so convinced of the paramount stakes of foreign policy not only out of sheer necessity but for moral reasons as well that they have crowned foreign policy ambition as nothing less than the ultimate test of the nation’s character and worth.

In this vein, back in 1993, as Americans and especially their leaders were still struggling to grasp the implications of the Cold War’s end, I wrote that that epic contest

“generated some troubling theories about America’s national identity and purpose which have become all too uncontroversial. Specifically, many of us have come to believe that America will never be true to its best traditions unless it is engaged in some kind of world mission, that creating a more perfect United States is not a noble or an ambitious enough goal for a truly great people, that we will be morally and spiritually deficient unless we continue to be the kind of globe-girdling power we have been for the past half century.”

In fact, I was always struck by the fact that even a major foreign policy decision-maker and thinker such as George F. Kennan – who for most of his career was not much of a globalist at all – fell under this idea’s sway (or did during his most globalist period). Why else would he have ended his famous 1947 Foreign Affairs article outlining the anti-Soviet containment strategy with this description of the upcoming challenge:

“The issue of Soviet-American relations is in essence a test of the over-all worth of the United States as a nation among nations. To avoid destruction the United States need only measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation.

“Surely, there was never a fairer test of national quality than this. In the light of these circumstances, the thoughtful observer of Russian-American relations will find no cause for complaint in the Kremlin’s challenge to American society. He will rather experience a certain gratitude to a Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear.”

In the Blinken context, I was reminded of these claims by this sentence from someone as embedded in the think tank-centered globalist foreign policy Blob as the likely Secretary-to-be has been. Biden, writes this author, “will be flanked and assisted by a group of ambitious, sophisticated, and energetic aides eager to leave their mark on American foreign policy—and the world.”

This observation isn’t exactly the same as identifying Blinken as a foreign policy-uber-alles type. But it’s close enough to unnerve me, and raises the question of what makes these Biden staffers believe that the vast majority of Americans want them to “leave their mark on…foreign policy – and the world,” as opposed to expecting them to reserve blood and treasure for genuinely, and nationally, vital purposes, and hoping that they’ll avoid major blunders?

The answer, of course, is “nothing,” and makes clear that if Biden foreign policy team members are is thinking of shining in the history books, they’ll lower their sights, keep their collective noses to the grindstone, and view America’s international business as a sacred trust rather than a vehicle for their personal — or even the nation’s — reputation.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Globalists are Pushing for Anti-Jihadist Endless Wars in Africa

Tags

Africa, America First, Blob, border security, globalism, Immigration, ISIS, jihadism, Middle East, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Serenity Prayer, The Washington Post, travel ban

I started off my new article for The National Interest on America’s lost global lead in semiconductor manufacturing with the observation that “One of the leading features, and weakness[es], of globalist U.S. foreign policy has been the tendency to look mainly to foreign policy to solve problems that domestic policy could likely handle better. That’s because all else equal, conditions at home are much easier to change and control than conditions overseas.”

And one of my examples was “To eradicate, or at least reduce, jihadist terrorism, administrations from both parties mired the nation in costly and protracted foreign wars rather than secure the homeland.”

Little did I expect that the very same day this piece appeared, a front page article in the Washington Post would make clear that although the America First-oriented Trump administration has at least partly learned this lesson, the bipartisan, globalist U.S. foreign policy Blob, (which will return to power if Democratic candidate Joe Biden becomes President, and which contains many Mainstream Media journalists who faithfully serve as its mouthpieces) remains clueless.

The headline alone clinches both these cases: “ISIS attacks surge in Africa even as Trump boasts of a ‘100-percent’ defeated caliphate.”

It’s clear purposes – to spotlight a major broken Trump promise, and to whip up fears that the same kinds of jihadists who have attacked the United States are alive and kicking despite the President’s boasts, and that his ego and blockheaded isolationist foreign policy impulses will only ensure that this threat will keep metastasizing if he remains in office.

After all, “The rise in violence comes as the Trump administration moves to slash U.S. troop deployments and threatens to curtail support for local governments on the front lines of the battle against Islamist militants. The White House is considering steeper cutbacks in U.S. military forces in Africa, despite warnings from some analysts that the reductions could further hamper efforts to check the extremists’ advance.”

Worse, readers are told, the President has been repeating this mistake elsewhere: Despite performing well in killing jihadist leaders, and tightening “the noose on [ISIS] followers in Iraq and Syria, other White House policies undermined the effort to defeat violent Islamist militant ideology globally, according to …counterterrorism experts.”

Specifically, “Trump surprised his own security advisers by twice announcing — and then reversing — a decision to unilaterally withdraw U.S. forces from Syria, signaling an abandonment of U.S.-allied Kurdish fighters who were still battling thousands of Islamic State militants who fled as the caliphate was crumbling.”

And the icing on this cake of failures: Mr. Trump’s “anti-Islam rhetoric and ban on Muslim immigrants handed the militants a propaganda win, reinforcing a ‘fundamental al-Qaeda message, which is that America is against Islam’” as one of these experts contended.

Leaving aside the fact that the immigrants ban wasn’t on Muslims, but on individuals from terror-prone countries, these establishment authorities have it completely backward and the President’s generally America First-y approach is the commonsensical and strategically sound route to follow.

Unless you, like they, think that U.S. advisers or forces or whatever should spend the indefinite future running around failed regions of the world trying to stamp out the extremist factions that keep popping up precisely because of their homelands’ chronically dysfunctional conditions? And that since this strategy has worked so well in the Middle East, it’s now time to reenact it in Africa, where circumstances may be even worse? Because the continent is “already beset by poverty, corruption and the novel coronavirus”?

In fact, as America First-ers recognize, it’s precisely because Africa’s countries are (to quote the Post article) “ill-equipped to fight insurgencies that are well-armed and geographically dispersed” – or to perform as effective governments in just about any way – that Trump travel ban-like and other border security measures represent America’s best hopes by far for ensuring that Africa’s jihadist problems don’t become U.S. jihadist problems. This America First approach, by contrast, can only mire the nation in a new series of futile Endless Wars in one of the world’s least promising theaters.

And to complete this portrait of foreign policy Upside Down World, the biggest mistake in this regard that Mr. Trump has made has been his eager adoption of the globalist goal of defeating ISIS “100 percent” – and presumably eliminating jihadist threats for good with military shock and awe.

Instead, as I’ve written, he should have focused on U.S. borders all along – or at least portrayed continuing anti-terrorist military involvement in the Middle East and elsewhere as a bridge to the time when they become secur enough to keep out jihadists et al however active they are abroad.

The oft-quoted Serenity Prayer begins this way:

“God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change; 
courage to change the things I can; 
and wisdom to know the difference.”

That’s logic that’s hard to argue with – and evidence that whoever wrote it would have been an America First-er today.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: The Public Outscores the Experts on China Trade Policy

Tags

(What's Left of) Our Economy, allies, America First, Blob, Center for Strategic and International Studies, China, CSIS, elites, globalism, multilateralism, tariffs, Trade, trade war, Trump, World Trade Organization, WTO

So many big takeaways from a new poll on U.S. and global attitudes toward China and U.S. China policy (both the economic and national security dimensions), I hardly know where to begin! But if I could only write a lede paragraph for a single news article (or blog item), here’s what I’d say: The American public is a great deal more sensible on how to deal with the People’s Republic than so-called “thought leaders.” And what I mean by “more sensible” is more “America First-y” and less globalist.

The survey was conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington, D.C.-based think tank not only squarely in the globalist camp, but a charter member of the globalist, bipartisan U.S. foreign policy “Blob” (which includes a sizable trade and economic sub-Blob) that exerted dominant influence over America’s course in world affairs until Donald Trump came along, and whose supposed expertise still mesmerizes the Mainstream Media.

Of special interest, CSIS sampled opinion from everyday Americans, those so-called thought leaders (whose follower-ship, as implied above, is greatly diminished), and thought leaders from countries that are U.S. allies or “partners.”

The gap between public and elites on China policy views seems widest on the economic and trade issues that President Trump has made so central to his approach towards the People’s Republic, and the CSIS survey contains decidedly good news for him and his fans in this area: The general public is much more supportive of the “go-it-alone,” unilateral sanctions and tariffs imposed by Mr. Trump to combat and/or eliminate Chinese transgressions in this area than the Blob-ers.

Although a multilateral approach (using “international agreements and rules to change China” economically) won plurality backing among the general public (34.8 percent), fully 69 percent of the U.S. thought leaders favored this route. Yet nearly a third of the U.S. public (32.8 percent) endorsed employing “U.S. government tools like sanctions and tariffs”, versus only three percent of the deep thinkers.

As I’ve written repeatedly, (e.g., here and here) a multilateral China trade strategy is bound to fail because international institutions (like the World Trade Organization) are too completely filled by countries that either rely heavily on China-style predation to compete in the global economy, and because even (or especially?) longstanding U.S. treaty allies had been doing business so profitably with the People’s Republic that the last development they wanted to see was a disruption of the pre-Trump status quo. So support for multilateralism in this case can legitimately be taken as support for do-nothing-ism – especially since the vast majority of these elites so enthusiastically pushed for the reckless U.S. expansion of commerce with China that’s lined many of their pockets, but that’s undermined American prosperity and national security.

The CSIS poll, moreover, provides some indirect evidence for this argument: Nearly as high a share of the foreign thought leaders backed a multilateral approach for dealing with China economically (65 percent) as their U.S. counterparts. And their support of U.S.-only approaches (seven percent) was only slightly higher than that of the U.S. thought leaders’ three percent. (The foreign thought leaders may be slightly more gung ho for America going it alone due to confidence that their own products will fill any gaps in the China market left by U.S. producers shut out by the trade wars. On a net basis, though, their countries are coming out losers this year.)

At the same time, one surprising (at least to me) economics-related finding emerged from the survey: Whether we’re talking about the American people generally, or thought leaders at home or abroad, just under 20 percent favor substantial decoupling from China as the best economic approach for the United States.

When it comes to messaging, however, the survey isn’t such great news for Mr. Trump – and Trumpers – on China trade issues. On the one hand, answers to the question on evaluating his performance in this area can – although with a stretch – be interpreted to show majority support for the view that his record has achieved noteworthy gains. Principally, 27.8 percent of U.S. public respondents agreed that the President’s China measures have “been effective in producing some tactical changes in Chinese economic policy” and 9.9 percent believe they have “been effective in forcing long-term changes.” Those groups add up to 37.7 percent of the sample.

Another 20.5 percent checked the box stating that Trump policies have “hurt U.S. consumers and exporters but protected important U.S. industries.” A case can be made that at least some members of this group would give these policies good grades, or that many would give them partly good grades, possibly bringing the total for positive views somewhere in the mid-40 percent neighborhood.

Much more certain, however, is that the most popular single answer (with 41.8 percent support) was that the trade war “has damaged U.S. economic interests without achieving positive change in China.”

Also signaling a Trump China messaging problem – as with much other commentary, the CSIS survey mostly measures China policy success as changing Chinese behavior. In my view, that goal is much less important – because it’s much less realistic, at least in terms of producing verifiable reform – than protecting U.S.-based producers from China’s economic predation. The relative resilience shown by domestic industry both throughout the trade war and into the CCP Virus-induced recession indicate that this goal is being achieved. But neither the President nor his economic nor his campaign team mentions it much, if at all.

CSIS’ polling also found that fully 71 percent of U.S. thought leaders gave Trump’s China economic policies the big thumbs down – and although they don’t vote, their aforementioned influence in the Mainstream Media could partly explain why broader American opinion on the Trump record seems so divided. (For the record, foreign thought leaders weren’t asked to rate the Trump strategy.)

But having established that everyday Americans have a good deal to teach the experts on China trade and economic policy, how do the two compare on China-related national security policies? As indicated above, the gap here isn’t nearly so wide, but worth exploring in some detail – as I’ll do in a forthcoming post!

Im-Politic: The Debate and the Current Danger

Tags

Blob, Democrats, election 2016, election 2020, globalism, Im-Politic, Joe Biden, Mainstream Media, Never Trumper, Populism, presidential debate, progressives, Trump

As difficult as it might be to believe that the verbal knife fight of a presidential debate held Tuesday night changed absolutely nothing about the election campaign, it’s increasingly clear to me that it changed absolutely nothing about the election campaign.

Politically speaking, that’s bad news for President Trump. After all, however flawed the national and, more important, the state polls might be, they’re virtually all saying that Democratic challenger Joe Biden is in the lead. Yes, there may be a significant hidden Trump vote out there, comprised of folks who either are too embarrassed to tell canvassers their real preferences, or too mistrustful of strangers, period. Yes, an enthusiasm gap does seem to favor the President. Yes, both nationally and in some key swing states, the results are tightening. But the hidden vote hypothesis remains a mere hypothesis. Anti-Trump sentiment could well overcome the lukewarm feelings about Biden. And the narrowing hasn’t been major or uniform as best as I can tell.

Therefore, for the debate to have helped the President, he needed to throw the former Vice President considerably off his game, or Biden needed to stumble into major trouble on his own. Neither happened. And since Mr. Trump and many of his backers set the expectations bar for Biden so low with their constant “Sleepy Joe” refrain and insistence that the 77-year old Democrat was losing his marbles along with too much of his physical energy and stamina, Biden’s at-least-perfectly fine coherence and energy level earned him a solid passing grade, and for now surely reeassured many voters worried about his capacities.

Interestingly, in this vein, the Trump performance displayed almost no interest in overtures of the President’s own aimed at enhancing his appeal beyond his base. One possible exception: For the first 20 minutes or so, the President was actually even-toned and on-message. But for whatever reason (some successful early baiting by Biden, frustration with moderator Chris Wallace, surprise at Biden’s performance, an inability to maintain self-control, or some combination of these), Mr. Trump eventually reverted to quasi-rally mode.

So it’s evident that, unless he decides to become more “presidential” (for lack of a better word) – a tactic that may well be way too late to convince any late deciders in any case – the President will continue to bank mainly on achieving two goals: first, amping up the (considerable) base to ensure astronomical turnout; and second, convincing some in key Democratic voting blocs that Biden can’t be trusted – as with his Tuesday night dig that Biden’s rejection of the Green New Deal proper means that hes “lost the Left,” and his Kamala Harris-like attacks on the former Vice President’s record on racial issues. Not that the first claim in particular can possibly be reconciled with other Trump allegations that his opponent will let “Socialism” run wild. But in American politics, consistency doesn’t necessarily equal effectiveness. At the same time, if the aforementioned polls are generally accurate, this Trump tack hasn’t paid off sufficiently yet.

But pure politics and the debate’s impact on the election aside, it’s also important to deal with fears that the event’s rancor once more revealed an American political system that can no longer produce leaders with both the competence and the personal qualities needed by any society to remain reasonably united – and therefore adequately successful by any measure. Of course, Mr. Trump and his supporters seem to have generated the greatest concerns along these lines, but there’s no shortage of worries that Biden is simply (as per the Trump statements above) a pawn of equally angry and reckless groups on the Left.

What, however, is new to say on these scores? The country was deeply and angrily divided before Mr. Trump was elected. It’s been deeply and angrily divided now and obviously will remain so after November 3. America’s most successful Presidents – the ones to whom the nation is most indebted – have been unifiers and motivators across the political spectrum. Mr. Trump has failed abjectly here – and revealingly, he’s failed despite a solid pre-CCP Virus record on that supposedly supremely important political issue, the economy.

Whether you believe he’s fanned these flames or not (and his regular use of violent words and phrases to describe what he’d like to do, or see happen, to some opponents clearly qualifies in my view), his interest in mollifying any critic’s legitimate concerns is nowhere to be found. He appears to have no clue how many women and for how long (a) have been victims of sexual assault and harmful, derogatory physical and verbal treatment of all kinds and (b) how they and others are genuinely pained and outraged by the (unpunished) behavior revealed on the “Access Hollywood” tape and alleged in several other cases, and by appearance-based insults of women (whose vulnerability to such verbal abuse has mattered so much more than that aimed at men simply because society and culture have been so thoroughly sexist for so long).

Moreover, although it may technically be true that the United States has cured itself of most truly systemic racism, he’s equally insensitive to the impact of cursory denials of these claims, and of how African Americans could validly point out that, contrary to the Trump MAGA campaign slogan, the nation wasn’t remotely “Great” for them for most of its pre-Trump (or pre-Obama) history. (I’m aware that former President Bill Clinton invoked the same idea, but Trump hard-liners need to do better here than such “What About-ism.”)

Nevertheless, lots of What About-ism is justified when it comes to the reactions – and previous records – of so many Trump critics. Unless they should be absolved of all blame for the nation’s current hot mess? As I’ve urged so many Never Trumpers since the President began his first run for the White House in 2015, it’s not enough to decry his various offenses. The best way to defeat him and insure against any Trumpist revivals (whether led by Mr. Trump or not) is to address seriously the genuine grievances that created so much of his base in the first place. To this day, however, the Never Trumpers have not only failed miserably or shown no signs of learning curves whatever. They’ve bent over backwards and turned cartwheels – often in some of the most deluded and/or dangerously unethical ways imaginable – to justify remaining in deep denial.

How do I count the examples? They include:

>the glaringly obvious effort to politicize intelligence and law enforcement agencies to sabotage his presidency with Russia collusion charges that turned out to be not only phony but look to have been planted or spread by the camps of both his 2016 Democratic rival Hillary Clinton and of the late globalist neoconservative Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona — among others;

>the literally hysterical drive to impeach Trump based on an almost completely routine instance of diplomacy and foreign policymaking;

>the utterly shameless leaking and fabrications – by career bureaucrats and establishment Republicans with whom Trump needed to staff much of his administration for lack of a large enough cadre of talented and experienced populists and America Firsters – that helped foster and sustain these anti-Trump campaigns;

>the eagerness of the Mainstream Media to swallow the leakers’ claims on these and other subjects, and propagate them without any meaningful, on-the-record corroboration;

>the adamant refusal of McCain and other card-carrying members of the globalist bipartisan foreign policy Blob to admit to the disasters their strategies produced (the Iraq nation-building effort, their gushing and often bought-and-paid-for support of the rise of China), and to acknowledge the possibility of viable alternatives;

>the mind-bogglingly hypocritical attacks on the Trump China and other tariffs by Congressional Democrats and labor leaders who spent literally decades calling for the exact same policies in order to improve working- and middle-class economic fortunes;

>the transformation of support for more lenient but still sane immigration policies into thinly-disguised support for an Open Borders approach (epitomized by the backing of every Democratic candidate at this primary debate for providing free government healthcare to illegal aliens);

>the full-throated endorsement by growing numbers of progressives and other Democrats of dangerously divisive identity politics, education as outright propaganda, and authoritarian curbs on free expression;

>and perhaps most tragically ironic of all, the now common calls for anti-Trump and other forms of violence by Democrats – including Biden.  

All of which leaves much of the country with a dispiritingly Hobson’s Choice. I continue making it as I have since it became apparent that Mr. Trump was in the 2016 race to stay: If I could have chosen anyone in the U.S. population to stand for a critical mass of the public policies I’ve long supported, Mr. Trump wouldn’t have been in the first 95 percent of my choices – for all the inexperience and personality-related reasons that were on everyone’s mind.

But against virtually all expectations (including my own) he prevailed against a large, experienced Republican field. And for the reasons described above, his Democratic opponent struck me as being both unacceptable on most issues and dwnright scary on the intangibles.

Four years later, I see the same situation – though my fears about Trump’s opponents now go way beyond Biden himself. So I’ll make the same choice. I’m also left with these observations and (unanswered) questions, which first appeared in a 2018 article in connection with U.S. foreign policy, but which apply to all other major issues as well:

“….American elections have brought to power any number of mainstream politicians, and through them any number of policy operatives, skilled, experienced, and knowledgeable enough to maintain the status quo competently and even effect important reforms. And as shown by Trump’s election, the White House can be won by an outsider with avowedly disruptive ambitions who is largely unfamiliar with Washington’s formal and informal levers of power (and lacking an advisory corps large and savvy enough to at least partly tame the federal bureaucracy).

“But what is still unknown is whether a leader unconventional enough to develop or support truly innovative foreign policy ideas can rise to the top through the current political system and all of its stay-the-course influences and incentives. Equally uncertain—can the world outside mainstream political and policy circles produce a leader both willing to think and act outside establishment boxes, yet versed enough in its ways to achieve transformational goals? And perhaps most important of all: can the nation produce such a leader before war or depression make overhaul unavoidable.”

Im-Politic: The Globalist Never Trump Blob Shows its True Colors

Tags

America First, Biden, Blob, Byron York, democracy, election interference, globalism, globalists, Im-Politic, Michael McFaul, Never Trumper, Russia, Senate Intelligence Committee, social media, The American Conservative, The Atlantic, Trump, Twitter, Washington Examiner

If you believed that you’d been wronged on social media because someone had erroneously described your tweet on purpose, wouldn’t you stand by that tweet or post? Apparently not if you’re Michael McFaul. At least not for a while.

And his activity on Twitter in the last few days is worth highlighting because even though you haven’t heard of him, McFaul is a card-carrying member of the bipartisan globalist U.S. foreign policy Blob. A recent tweet of his, moreover, epitomized the views of this group of current bureaucrats, former officials, Mainstream Media journalists, and think tankers that even President Trump’s partial implementation of a fundamentally different foreign policy strategy he calls “America First” poses such a mortal danger to both national and international security that any means justify the end of defeating it.

In addition, McFaul’s reaction to criticism also adds to the thoroughly Orwellian spectacle that’s been staged this last week by these and Never Trumpers in politics in (a) charging (based entirely on anonymous sources) that Mr. Trump has privately expressed contempt for Americans servicemen and women who have risked their lives for their country; (b) claiming that this unsubstantiated report, published Thursday in The Atlantic, proves the President’s contemptible character; and (c) insisting that some or all of the Atlantic piece’s allegations have been confirmed because they’ve been repeated by other anonymous sources to other journalists. (BTW, for all anyone knows – and for all these other journalists know – the sources they’re using may be the same accusers.)

As indicated above, McFaul is not your every day, garden variety tweeter. He’s considered a leading academic authority on Russia who served in the Obama administration for five years, including two as ambassador to Moscow. He’s got nearly 517,000 followers. He also tweets a lot: 85,000 to date! (Almost as much as yours truly!) And if you spend more than thirty seconds on his feed, you’ll see that he really doesn’t like the President or his policies.

Which is his right. It’s also his right to have tweeted the day the Atlantic article came out that “Trump has lost the Intelligence Community. He has lost the State Department. He has lost the military. How can he continue to serve as our Commander in Chief?”

But Washington Examiner political correspondent Byron York was just as entitled to respond on Twitter the following morning (Friday) that “This tweet has disturbing undertones in our democratic system. Trump is commander-in-chief because he was elected president, and he will remain commander-in-chief as long as he is president, for a second term if re-elected.” 

McFaul, not surprisingly was outraged. He tweeted back to York that evening : “Byron, you know DAMN well that I was not advocating a coup! You know damn well that I support democracy 100%, at home and abroad. Of course Americans voters, including 2 million federal workers, determine who the CiC is. I tolerate such nonsense from trolls. But from you? Wow.”

But here’s an even bigger “Wow.” When you clicked on the York cite of the original tweet, Twitter told you it was no longer available. McFaul had deleted it.

The plot sickened yesterday afternoon when McFaul himself evidently recognized how feckless his actions looked. He sent out the following Tweet, which added a sentence to the original: “Trump has lost the Intelligence Community. He has lost the State Department. He has lost the military. How can he continue to serve as our Commander in Chief? Our soldiers, diplomats, and agents deserve better. We deserve better. #Vote.”

Which returns us – and him – to Legitimate Opinion-Land. But McFaul needed prompting, as several of his followers and others had previously asked him why he deleted the original if was so indignant over York’s comments. Moreover, McFaul is hardly inarticulate. Why didn’t he include this qualifier in the original?

Even stranger: In a follow up tweet, McFaul stated “I retweeted with a clarifying sentence. 50,000 + people understood exactly what I meant. But trying to be more precise to the handful who I confused or deliberately distorted my views. But I know @ByronYork personally. There’s NO WAY he could believe that I’d support a coup.” In other words, lots of furious backtracking for a confused or mendacious handful.

Or was it a handful? Shortly before that tweet, McFaul had told his followers “Im deleting this tweet below. It has been misunderstood –whether deliberately or unintentionally — too much. Here is what I meant to say: If you believe Trump has not served our country well as Commander in Chief, vote him out of the job in November. https://twitter.com/McFaul/status/1302071499914842112”

At the same time, McFaul’s clear and ongoing belief in the fundamental illegitimacy of Mr. Trump’s presidency can’t legitimately be questioned. Just late last month, in an on-line op-ed , he wrote that a recent Senate Intelligence Committee report had shown that:

“Far from a hoax, as the president so often claimed, the report reveals how the Trump campaign willingly engaged with Russian operatives implementing the influence effort.”

Even worse, in his eyes,

“[S]ome of the most egregious practices from the 2016 presidential campaign documented by the Senate investigation are repeating themselves in the 2020 presidential campaign. Once again, Putin wants Trump to win and appears to be seeking to undermine the legitimacy of our election. Just like in 2016, Putin has deployed his conventional media, his social media operations and his intelligence assets to pursue these objectives.

“Most shockingly, Trump and his allies have decided to — again — play right along.”

To McFaul’s credit, he at least acknowledged that “China, Iran and Venezuela now in the disinformation game” as well. (For details on China’s massive efforts, see my recent American Conservative article.)

He added that “it will be up to American voters to decide when and how cooperation with foreign actors during a presidential election crosses the line,” but indicated that the main reason was “Because waiting for criminal investigations or more congressional hearings will be too late….”

Most ominously, McFaul continues to maintain that the President has remained loyal to Putin, not once criticizing him in public and often undermining policies from his own administration to contain and deter Putin’s belligerent behavior abroad.”

In contrast, Democratic nominee Joe Biden “has affirmed that his campaign will not use information or accept assistance provided by foreign actors….In addition, Biden has assured Americans that he would retaliate in response to any foreign interference.”

So when McFaul declares that “Trump and Biden’s contrasting positions on Russian interference in American elections are clear. Whether voters care about these differences, however, is not as obvious,” it sounds to me that if the President is reelected, the de-legitimization campaign by McFaul and the rest of the Blob will continue. You don’t have to call that a coup to recognize it’s not democratic politics-as-usual, either.