Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Establishment Goes Farther Off the Deep End on North Korea

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alliances, allies, China, Cold War, deterrence, James Jeffrey, Japan, North Korea, nuclear war, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, South Korea, Soviet Union, The Atlantic, Trump

James Jeffrey’s new post in The Atlantic on the North Korea nuclear crisis has so much to commend it. (Yes, there’s a “but” coming, and it’s enormous, but let’s give him his due.)

The former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey and Iraq valuably reminds readers of the dangers of assuming – as per the latest conventional wisdom – that North Korea’s motives for developing nuclear forces potent enough to threaten the American homeland are purely defensive. This confidence, he notes, may be convenient for justifying a call for the United States to clear the way for a negotiated solution to the crisis by backing off its longstanding insistence on Pyongyang’s denuclearization. But no one aside from Kim Jong-un himself can have any confidence in assessing what’s inside his head.

As a result, Jeffrey also recognizes that the nuclear deterrence strategy that helped prevent Soviet and Chinese aggression during the Cold War (and so far seems to be helping curb Russian and Chinese expansionism nowadays) is far from guaranteed to work against a leader with a history of erratic and even violent behavior, and who is heir to a regime with a similar history – including absorbing enormous sacrifices to “reunify” the Korean peninsula under its rule. (At the same time, Jeffrey seems to undercut these arguments at the end by calling the denuclearization goal unreasonable, and signaling his support for a compromise that would leave the North with “some nuclear capability” in exchange for “a ‘temporary’ diplomatic solution that stops North Korean development of systems that can strike the U.S.”

In addition, Jeffrey forthrightly explains that both the Cold War deterrence strategies and their latter-day Korean counterpart depended on a gamble that involved putting the U.S. homeland at risk of nuclear attack, and denying an American president any real choice but to push the nuclear button that would surely bring this about.

Finally, the author understands that U.S. security interests could be powerfully served – and deterrence on the Korean peninsula strengthened – by encouraging South Korea and Japan to develop their own nuclear weapons (although he never addresses the objection that neither country would likely go to these lengths as long as they can free-ride on the American defense guarantee).

So Jeffrey deserves great credit for going beyond conventional foreign policy thinking in many important respects. But in the most important respect by far, he’s solidly inside the consensus – which astonishingly, and let’s face it – derangedly – believes that there is any objective that the United States could achieve that’s worth any significant risk of nuclear attack on one or more major American cities.

Specifically, the author believes that North Korea may indeed have aggressive aims, and that the nuclear forces it will soon possess will be powerful enough to keep the United States on the sidelines if he attacks the South for fear that he will strike at the American territory. As a result, he believes that “the possibility of military action against North Korea could be understood not as a ‘good thing,’ but as the ‘least bad.’”

And although he does not call on the Trump administration to launch a “preventive war” to take out the North Korean nukes, he insists that steps that could result in such an attack on the United States, namely “a preemptive strike (or generating a credible threat of one to frighten China to act against Pyongyang), however awful, could be the least risky” way to a avoid several even worse alternatives.

And what are these alternatives? On top of the conquest of the South, and “abandoning 80 years of global collective security,” or watching “China intervene to ‘check’ Pyongyang, thereby pulling South Korea (and Japan) into China’s security orbit and ending the security regime the U.S. has maintained in the Pacific since 1945.”

I agree that these would be important setbacks for American interests. But would they be worse than watching several major U.S. metropolitan areas become burning, glowing wastelands? This is where I get off the boat – and I believe anyone with a lick of sanity should follow.

Do you and the rest of the American people agree? I strongly suspect the answer to both questions is “Yes,” but re the latter, here’s what’s most outrageous, and indeed unacceptable: We have no way of knowing, because all wings of the nation’s foreign policy establishment have pursued a strategy of hiding these risks from the public.

That’s why I keep contending that, given North Korea’s impending ability to hit the United States with nuclear weapons, the only policy capable of eliminating this threat (to the extent possible) is pulling the American forces out, thereby removing any reason for North Korea to launch a nuclear strike on American territory, and allowing the powerful, wealthy countries of the region handle Kim anyway they wish. Alternatively, let’s at least put this question – literally one of life and death – directly to the Americans who have been hoodwinked for so long and who would pay the price of hewing to the status quo, and see what they think.

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Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Real Message Sent by the Trump Security Strategy Blueprint

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alliances, allies, America First, Asia-Pacific, borders, burden sharing, China, Cold War, deterrence, Eastern Europe, Europe, free-riding, Germany, globalism, international institutions, internationalism, Japan, Middle East, nation-building, National Security Strategy, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, North Korea, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, South Korea, sovereignty, Soviet Union, terrorism

The Blob – a wonderful nickname for the Washington, D.C.-centered complex of establishmentarian foreign policy bureaucrats, former officials, think tanks, lobbyists, and journalists – has actually come up with a useful insight in noting some important contradictions between the Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) document, and the president’s speech announcing the document’s release.

It’s hardly new to observe that big differences on crucial issues seem to divide President Trump from his top advisers, though it’s always valuable to note, since this gap can’t possibly make American diplomacy more effective, and could cause real problems. My chief NSS-related concern, however, could be even more important: Mr. Trump’s speech once again demonstrates that he himself remains pretty confused about his foreign policy priorities – and not entirely convinced that priority-setting is particularly important at all.

Not that presidents are often perfectly consistent about America’s approach to international challenges and opportunities. And given the diversity of these challenges and opportunities, consistency itself can be a vastly overrated virtue – at best. But these days, much more clarity is urgently needed – especially since President Trump has touted himself as such a disrupter; especially since the America First-style disruption he touts is badly needed on many fronts, in my opinion; and especially since disruption is badly needed because some genuinely dangerous situations are nearing crisis territory, and some existing crises keep worsening.

With that backdrop in my mind, two of these clashing ideas – maybe described more accurately as sets of impulses? – stand out. The first has to do with America’s major security alliances. Mr. Trump has consistently, and in my view, understandably, complained about defense free-riding by countries in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region in particular that for decades have enjoyed protection by U.S. conventional and nuclear forces. And his December 18 NSS speech continued in this vein, scolding his White House predecessors for failing “to insist that our often very wealthy allies pay their fair share for defense, putting a massive and unfair burden on the U.S. taxpayer and our great U.S. military.”

He’s absolutely right that major economies like like Germany, Japan, and South Korea should pay far more, and not only because they can afford to do so – and free up American resources for major domestic needs in the process. They need to pay more because they face far greater threats from potential aggressors like Russia and China and North Korea than does the United States.

If President Trump would start highlighting the discrepancy – firmly based in geography – between the security challenges faced by the United States and those faced by its allies, he might actually achieve greater defense burden-sharing. But he makes a fatal mistake when boasts that his administration’s “new” strategy “emphasizes strengthening alliances to cope with these threats.  It recognizes that our strength is magnified by allies who share principles — and our principles — and shoulder their fair share of responsibility for our common security.”

For whenever the allies have heard phrases like “common security,” they have concluded that the United States can’t afford to put any meaningful pressure on them to boost defense budgets – because its own vital interests will always persuade it to fill any gaps. History could not teach more clearly the lesson that America’s failure to stress that its alliances are helpful assets, not vital necessities, and that its support for these arrangements is not unconditional, has been the kiss of death for any efforts to eliminate or reduce free-riding. And the Trump administration’s burden-sharing campaign will surely founder on exactly these shoals.

If we were living in another (past) decade, this shortcoming might be No Big Deal. After all, as I’ve previously written, America’s major alliance commitments, including their nuclear dimension, involved either pledges to protect arguably vital or potentially vital regions, or to deter adversaries, like North Korea, that couldn’t retaliate in kind against the American homeland. So it’s anything but entirely surprising that, for decades during the Cold War and after, these alliances achieved their overseas goals and kept the United States itself safe.

But the likeliest alliance-related potential flashpoints nowadays are totally different. Russia, which still has plenty of nuclear weapons, is seriously threatening only Baltic and other East European countries that were recklessly invited to join the North Atlantic Treat Organization (NATO) even though their fates have never been considered vital interests by American leaders. Even during the Cold War, America’s European allies were never entirely convinced that Washington would risk DC, or New York, to save Paris or London. It’s that much less credible to suppose that U.S. leader would risk a major American city to save Riga.

Frighteningly, however, that’s precisely a catastrophe that the United States today could suffer because it remains American strategy to deny a president any real choice but to act. And the means to this perilous end? A growing U.S. military presence in Eastern Europe not remotely strong enough to repel a Russian attack, but large enough to put irresistible political pressure on Washington to go nuclear to save it from annihilation, or to retaliate for its loss.

Such American tripwire forces remain on the Korean peninsula, too, and their tripwire mission also remains exactly the same – even though North Korea can now, or will shortly be able to, respond to American nuclear weapons use by destroying U.S. cities.

In other words, greater alliance burden-sharing – and probably much greater changes – now need to be squarely on President Trump’s table not simply to achieve greater economic equity and to finance domestic policies more responsibly. They’re needed to reduce as dramatically as possible the chances that nuclear weapons will land on American soil. But as Mr. Trump’s speech indicates, there’s no reason to suppose that he’s even considering this type of disruption.

The second set of clashing ideas or impulses has to do with the overall purpose of American foreign policy. I’ve been writing for decades that the main flaw in the internationalist approach dominating the country’s diplomacy for decades has been its insistence that the United States can be no more secure, prosperous, or free than the world at large. Therefore, internationalism (which Mr. Trump and many of his supporters tend to call “globalism”), whether in its conservative or liberal forms, has pursued a worldwide reformist and policing agenda even in areas where the United States had no tangible stakes whatever, or where the benefits never remotely approached the costs and risks.

In his NSS speech, Trump (again) rightly lambasted the archetypical post-Cold War version of this internationalism: “nation-building.” He emphasized that “We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone” and repeated an important (potentially and constructively) disruptive in marker laid down in previous addresses:

“We will pursue the vision we have carried around the world over this past year — a vision of strong, sovereign, and independent nations that respect their citizens and respect their neighbors; nations that thrive in commerce and cooperation, rooted in their histories and branching out toward their destinies.”

The point about a world of “strong, sovereign, and independent nations” represents long overdue pushback against the globalist objective of a world increasingly governed by ever more powerful international rules and institutions that can only undermine national self-rule – and are likeliest to focus on restraining U.S. freedom of action.

But the business about respecting citizens and neighbors (along with his concern about “vigorous military, economic, and political contests…now playing out all around the world”), and thriving in commerce and cooperation, too strongly resembles the standard internationalist boilerplate that has launched the nation on so many, often disastrously, misguided Americanizing missions.

And although an explicit Trump-ian return to nation-building etc seems wildly improbable, first consider the president’s description of his anti-terrorism goals in the Middle East, and then try to figure out how they can be reached without transforming this dysfunctional region into something light years from where it is now, and that it has never been: “confronting, discrediting, and defeating radical Islamic terrorism and ideology” and preventing “terrorists such as ISIS to gain control of vast parts of territory all across the Middle East.”

Far better for him to focus like the proverbial laser beam on “not letting them into the United States” – a goal that, however difficult, is far more practicable than curing what ails a remote, often hostile part of the world with which the United States has almost nothing in common.

The conventional wisdom about documents like the National Security Strategy is that they’re overwhelmingly for show, have virtually nothing to do with an administration’s day in and day out decisions, and lack any meaningful predictive power. Ditto for sweeping presidential speeches on grandiose subjects. And again, the conventional wisdom isn’t entirely wrong.

But as even cynics tend to concede, just as NSS-like reports result from the work of numerous government agencies and therefore hundreds of junior and senior officials (including political appointees), prepared presidential remarks (even in this administration) usually represent the combined efforts of many White House officials and also incorporate input from a wide range of government agencies. As a result, it’s far-fetched to suppose that they’re completely devoid of meaning. For me, they can reveal two important insights about a chief executive’s foreign policy outlook and potential.

First, as suggested above, they can yoke presidents to ill-considered and even dangerous commitments. Consequently, they can create equally ill-considered and even dangerous public expectations, too. Of course, circumstances force politicians to execute U-turns all the time, but the more obvious they are (because they reverse positions prominently staked out), the more (needlessly) damaging they can be.

Second, and more important, they speak can volumes about how well presidents can handle the challenge of making hard foreign policy choices, their related willingness to acknowledge in the first place that not all good things are possible simultaneously, or even close, and their consequent ability to establish sustainable priorities. In these respects, the president’s remarks about his administration’s first NSS display too many of the shortcomings that produced globalism’s major failures.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: A Neglected Reason for Skepticism About Deterring North Korea

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allies, America First, Asia, China, Cold War, deterrence, Eastern Europe, Japan, North Korea, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, South Korea, Trump, Western Europe

With President Trump traveling around Asia and talking North Korea, among other subjects, with the region’s heads of state, it’s a good time to bring up an aspect of the nuclear crisis that hasn’t received enough attention – including from yours truly.

It’s what political science types might call the asymmetry in stakes perceived by the North and by the United States, and it’s a problem that’s greatly complicating American efforts to resist China’s recent expansionism in Asian coastal waters and Russia’s similar activities in its borderlands, as well as North Korea’s designs. It also differentiates these national security challenges from their prime Cold War era counterparts.

In plain English, “asymmetry in stakes etc” means that what the United States on the one hand, and North Korea, China, and Russia on the other, are arguing about means much more to those three American rivals than it does to the United States itself. As a result, especially with all of those rivals either able or on the verge of being able to hit a U.S. cities with nuclear-armed missiles, Washington’s commitment to defend the countries in their cross-hairs is much less believable than the prospect that they will call America’s bluff and risk a military conflict.

After all, the United States would be put in a position of exposing its territory and population to nuclear attack for relatively low priority interests – principally, South Korea, freedom of navigation in the South and East China Seas, and small Eastern European countries that until recently were well inside the Soviet orbit for decades with no apparent effect on U.S. security or prosperity.

North Korea, China, and Russia would also be running nuclear risks if military showdowns develop.  For them, however, the upsides are more highly prized. And since the downside for America involves catastrophes that would equal the September 11 attacks by about a zillion, it’s likely that the United States would not decide, as the saying goes, to sacrifice Washington or New York or (FILL IN CITY OF YOUR CHOICE) to save Seoul or Vilnius (capital of the Baltic state Lithuania) or Asian sea-lanes.

Of course, the United States vowed to use nuclear weapons to defend allies during the Cold War, too, and the threat clearly achieved the desired deterrent effect. But thinking in “asymmetry terms” explains why these circumstances differed fundamentally from today’s. The main allies being defended – Western Europe and Japan – were continually identified as high priorities by Washington, and the reasons were entirely understandable. Both were major potential and then actual concentrations of industrial, technological – and therefore military – power. Their possible shift into the Soviet (or, less likely, Chinese), camp would transfer major assets to U.S. adversaries and weaken the overall strength of the free world.

I’d long had my doubts about whether preventing even losses this great were worth risking a global nuclear cataclysm, but this proposition was at least reasonably debatable, in my opinion. Preventing the losses at risk now? Not even close.

And what’s also surely instructive about the Cold War experience is that the European allies, in particular, never fully believed the American pledge. That’s largely why the United Kingdom and especially France developed their own impressive nuclear arsenals. Fast forward to today, and America’s nuclear pledges, especially in Asia, are more deeply doubted. That’s why South Korea and Japan are discussing creating their own nuclear forces more actively and urgently than ever.

In a previous post, I’d identified other reasons for challenging what may be a growing belief that North Korea can be deterred by America’s nuclear weapons just like the Soviet Union and China were during the Cold War – and that therefore some kind of agreed upon freeze in Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program is the most realistic way to resolve the crisis peacefully and acceptably. The asymmetry argument is another important reason for skepticism.

It’s entirely possible that I’m wrong. And I’d be perfectly happy to support such an effort. But if a freeze becomes the aim, I want American forces – whose vulnerability to North Korean attack would put heavy pressure on any U.S. president to respond with nuclear weapons and possibly trigger North Korean nuclear retaliation – nowhere near the Korean peninsula. Because the chances that I’m right are much higher than zero. And I view the policy of incurring any risk of a nuclear warhead landing on American soil in order to save South Korea to be completely indefensible.

As argued above, Japan could reasonably be placed into a different, and higher priority, category. So although I’d prefer to see U.S. forces exit the Asia-Pacific region completely, a fallback position could be focusing American deterrence policies on protecting Japan (from whatever plans for global or regional hegemony or predominance or call it what you will China may be seeking), abandoning South Korea militarily (but as previously proposed, supporting its development of nuclear weapons and selling it whatever conventional arms it wants), and pulling back from the South China Sea (because, as also previously argued, any power controlling these waters will need to trade with America if it wants to grow acceptably fast).

It would be an Asian version of the partial pullback I’ve recommended for Europe. It’s also entirely consistent with what’s lately often been called an “America First” foreign policy. Maybe it’s something for President Trump to consider?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But then he immediately turned around and admitted,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Trump’s Real NATO Mistake

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allies, Article Five, Baltics, Barack Obama, Charles de Gaulle, Cold War, Europe, France, Germany, NATO, NATO expansion, North Atlantic treaty Organization, nuclear deterrence, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Poland, Russia, Soviet Union, tripwire, Trump, United Kingdom

President Trump’s tireless critics are at it again, accusing him of calling into question America’s “sacred” and allegedly legally binding obligation to come to the military defense of any of its European allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) if they come under armed attack.

As charged by the author linked above (from the reflexively establishmentarian Brookings Institution), the president’s refusal to endorse this obligation explicitly in his speech today at alliance headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, will “raise grave doubts about the credibility of the American security guarantee and provide Russia with an incentive to probe vulnerable Baltic states.” Sounds awful – and unprecedented – right? Actually, not even close.  But as you’ll see, Mr. Trump could be on his way to creating another big – and completely unnecessary – problem.

In the first place, in concrete terms, Article Five legally obligates the United States to do absolutely nothing specifically if one of its NATO allies comes under assault. The clause simply requires treaty signatories to “assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.”

And this flexibility-preserving wording is no accident, or product of jargon-addicted diplomats or international lawyers. It resulted from the U.S. Congress’ insistence that the American government and the people to which it owes its first loyalties to retain the legally recognized right to decide when to go to war. And keep in mind: Congress was determined to reserve the right to stay out of a conflict in Europe as the Cold War was reaching its height.

Just as important: The European allies recognized this right – and its implications – as well, especially after the Soviet Union’s development of major nuclear forces greatly increased the risk to the American homeland of nuclear attack if it plunged into war on the allies’ behalf. We know this for sure because the continuing ambiguity ultimately persuaded both the British and French to create their own nuclear forces. As former French President Charles de Gaulle warned, the United States could not reasonably be expected to endanger the existence of New York or Detroit to save Hamburg or Lyons.

Tragically, American leaders were so strongly opposed to its allies taking back control over their own fates that they strove almost fanatically to convince the Europeans that the United States could indeed be trusted. And Washington put its money where its mouth was, stationing hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, sailors, and air force personnel and their families on or around the European continent. The idea was to create a “trip wire” aimed at denying any U.S. President a real choice of rushing to Europe’s defense with whatever threats or means were necessary. For standing by in the face of aggression would mean a slaughter or American troops and possibly innocents by vastly superior Soviet military forces.

Even during this era of high East-West tensions, however, American leaders never completely lost sight of the desirability of shifting as much of the burden of nuclear risk as possible onto the Europeans – while maintaining as much control as possible over nuclear weapons use. The transatlantic feud over intermediate-range nuclear forces – which threatened to confine the nuclear damage of any East-West war to Europe, leaving the American and Soviet homelands unscathed – was only one prominent example. And even this U.S. aim was fatally muddied, or at best thoroughly confused, by the continuing enormous military presence in Germany, directly in the likeliest path of the Soviet conventional juggernaut.

After the Cold War ended, the tripwire was steadily dismantled, but American presidents continued to treat Article Five as an ironclad promise to defend NATO members militarily – as demonstrated by the 2013 Obama statement in the Atlantic article linked above. Moreover, once Russian military and paramilitary activity began to increase in Moscow’s “near abroad,” Washington began, hesitatingly, to be sure, to respond to the demands of the newest NATO members in Russia’s sights for U.S. tripwire forces of their own.

Hence the charges that President Trump’s latest statement could dangerously destabilize NATO’s eastern flank. But there’s far more to the situation. In the first place, there’s much evidence linking Russia’s new revanchism to NATO’s expansion eastward right up to Russia’s borders. Second, if Article Five were rigidly applied to new NATO members such as the Baltic states or former Soviet bloc countries like Poland, the United States would be running the risk of nuclear attack on behalf of countries that (a) are completely un-defendable with conventional military forces alone, because they’re right next door to Russia; and (b) consequently, have never been considered vital or even significant interests of the United States.

Troublingly, however, despite the latest Trump statement (or lack thereof), which arguably could inject the Eastern European countries with a needed dose of realism concerning their real options in dealing with Moscow, the president has so far continued the policy of incrementally responding to these countries’ requests for tripwires.

In other words, his big mistake isn’t casting doubt on America’s commitment to these and other European countries. For if the United States might have balked risking New York or Detroit for Hamburg or Lyons, it’s certainly not going to jeopardize an American city or two to save Warsaw or Vilnius. Instead, Mr. Trump apparently is trying to fence-straddle here, which could well create the worst of both worlds on both sides of the Atlantic.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: A Genuinely 21st Century Approach to Asia

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alliances, allies, Asia, China, Cold War, coupling, defense spending, East Asia-Pacific, extended deterrence, free-riding, Japan, Lifezette.com, North Korea, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, South Korea, Trade, trade surpluses, Trump, Xi JInPing

Yesterday in a piece for Lifezette.com, I argued that President Trump should ignore the advice he seems to be getting from his more establishmentarian advisers, and from conventional thinkers outside his administration, and focus on economics and not security when he meets Chinese leader Xi Jinping starting tomorrow.

Today, I’d like to spell out some of the assumptions about America’s priorities in the East Asia-Pacific (EAP) region that lead to these conclusions – and why genuinely bringing America’s grand strategy in the region into the twenty-first century is essential to reduce the nation’s vulnerability to nuclear attack and to strengthening its economy.

First, as I’ve long maintained, since the Cold War has been over for nearly three decades, the geopolitical basis for the current American approach to the EAP has simply disappeared. Until 1990, Washington provided a nuclear umbrella for the region and set up alliances for two main reasons. First, the United States was determined to keep Asia’s vast economic power and potential out of communist hands. Second, America resolved to prevent Japan from needing to conduct an independent foreign policy – which U.S. leaders believed would lead to its rearmament and likely reversion to 1930s- and ’40s-style militarism.

Since 1990, America’s goals have remained essentially the same, but one of the rationales shifted. Preventing Japanese rearmament was still (secretly) treated as an imperative. But with the Soviet threat gone and China increasingly integrated into the world economy, the United States began justifying its continued military presence as essential for buttressing the stability needed to keep the region’s economically dynamic countries functioning as major cogs of an increasingly close-knit global trade and investment system. Also reinforcing regional stability would be the continuing protection of South Korea from its bellicose northern neighbor.

The most dangerous problem with this approach is that, although it arguably made sense from the U.S. standpoint when America’s main actual and potential rivals in the region either had no nuclear weapons (North Korea), or vastly inferior and relatively primitive nuclear forces (China), it has become ever more suicidal more recently. For whereas once Washington could credibly brandish a nuclear threat to keep powerful enemy conventional forces at bay while incurring almost no risk of nuclear retaliation against the American homeland, the Chinese and even North Korean have now made major progress towards fielding nuclear weapons both capable of reaching American shores and of surviving U.S. nuclear attacks. As a result, they can now place American cities in mortal danger.

To modify a common Cold War-era saying, Washington has promised to sacrifice Los Angeles in order to save Seoul and/or Tokyo. Has anyone explained to the American people why this potential tradeoff is remotely acceptable – or even sane? Quite the contrary. A literally suicidal strategy keeps getting dressed up in terms that sound either comfortingly technical and abstract (like “extended deterrence”) or even warm and fuzzy (like “coupling”).

Indeed, the latter phrase, upon examination, reveals what has now become by far the least forgivable aspect of American strategy given current nuclear circumstances: The “coupling” of America’s security to its allies’ security was designed to force the United States to risk nuclear attack to protect Japan and South Korea. This aim was accomplished mainly by stationing major American forces right along the North-South Korea border – the Demilitarized Zone – to ensure that they would die during a North Korean invasion and thereby give an American president no real choice but to respond with nukes. The presence of the U.S. Seventh Fleet in Japanese bases and on patrol through regional waters serves the same purpose. That is, the United States surrendered one of the paramount goals of genuine national security since the Atomic Age began – the power to choose whether to involve itself in a nuclear war, or to avoid one. And Washington stubbornly clings to this strategy even though the nuclear landscape has been decisively transformed.

Two related developments make Washington’s acceptance of this risk even less acceptable. First, America’s Asian allies have become more than capable of defending themselves from their enemies. Yet even South Korea, with a possibly deranged dictatorship for a neighbor, has understandably decided to rely on American blood and treasure for its security, and skimped on its military spending. And although Japan has increased its own defense budget and capabilities significantly in recent years, its far greater economic power still justifies the label “free rider.”

Second, precisely because current nuclear circumstances make the American defense guarantee so literally non-credible despite the coupling strategy, the likelihood of Japan and South Korea acquiring nuclear weapons for their own defense rises with each new North Korean missile test and each new Chinese thrust into the South or East China Seas. In other words, if that train hasn’t already left the station, its engines are firing up.

There is, however, an immense silver lining that the supremely unconventional President Trump – unlike many of his advisers – should be quick to recognize: Because the Cold War threats are gone, and because the whole of the EAP relies so heavily on net exports – especially to the United States – for its growth, America no longer needs to worry about a foreign power controlling the region politically.

This development is of course most relevant to America’s China strategy. It means that even if Beijing established unquestioned hegemony in its backyard, China and all of its supposed new vassals would still desperately need to access the U.S. market. The flip side of this proposition is just as crucial: America’s paramount interests in the EAP are economic – ensuring adequate access to Asian markets, and safeguarding American domestic businesses and their employees from predatory Asian trade practices. Further, the best way to achieve these goals is by wielding economic, not military, power.

A U.S. China and Asia policy reflecting these trends – and other generally ignored regional realities that increasingly have been staring obtuse establishment analysts in the face – would make for a dramatically different agenda for this week’s China summit than has apparently been laid out. For example, President Trump has indicated that he will press China’s Xi harder to use his leverage on North Korea to curb or even end the latter’s nuclear weapons program, threaten to attack the North militarily if China doesn’t step up, but ease up on trade pressure if Beijing goes with the American Korea program.

Far better would be for Mr. Trump to recognize that this position raises the prospect of accepting continued Chinese trade predation as long as China even holds out the prospect of providing a North Korea assist; that even if North Korea’s nuclear weapons can’t hit American territory yet, a war with its regime could terribly bloody America’s conventional forces in the Pacific along with allied civilian populations; and that whatever nuclear threat to the United States faces from the North stems not from any intrinsic desire to attack America, but from continued U.S. military involvement in a decades-long Korean civil war that has only been suspended since 1953.

Modernized American priorities would enable the president eventually to tell his Chinese counterpart that the United States is greatly lowering its military profile in Korea, and that however China decides to deal with its dangerously predictable neighbor will be fine with Washington. But since both the Chinese and especially American allies would need time to prepare for this transition, and since a premature announcement would only embolden North Korea, Mr. Trump should simply downplay the subject at the summit, convey these messages privately as soon as Xi leaves, and let the transition begin before going public. A similar approach should be taken toward territorial disputes in the East and South China seas.

Having freed himself to focus on trade and other economic issues, the President should tack away from the conventional wisdom in this sphere, too. Specifically, he should acknowledge that the main lesson of long years of U.S. China trade diplomacy is that there’s no longer any point in negotiating trade agreement with Beijing. The Chinese record of breaking their promises is too long, and even an administration determined to monitor and enforce trade deals would face a formidable challenge in keeping track of conditions in China’s gargantuan industrial complex.

Instead, Mr. Trump should keep the discussion general and thank Mr. Xi for coming such a long way. Then once all the photo-op moments are finished, and he’s departed, the administration should develop a list of Chinese goods that represent especially egregious examples of trade predation (either in the Chinese market or the U.S. market, and impose unilateral tariffs on them. The president should specify that the list will keep growing until he receives reliable information that the Chinese have not only dropped trade barriers, but have compiled a serious track record of keeping them low – which will of course take several years to demonstrate. He should make clear that his own administration will be judge, jury, and court of appeals for any Chinese claims of compliance. And he should then let Mr. Xi know that he’s looking forward to their next meeting – and would of course be happy to come to Beijing.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Who are the Real “Hot Heads”?

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alliances, allies, America First, Asia, China, Cold War, establishment, Europe, foreign policy, foreign policy establishment, globalism, H.R. McMaster, internationalism, interventionism, Jim Mattis, Jonathan Stevenson, national security adviser, NATO, NATO expansion, North Korea, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Populism, Russia, Stephen K. Bannon, The New York Times, Trump, U.S. military, Vietnam

The Mainstream Media remain useful as a mouthpiece for an American political establishment that retains all too much power to frustrate Trump-ian – and other populist – impulses. So it’s vitally important to identify and evaluate emerging narratives they’re trying to propagate. And one that’s been especially prominent – and pernicious – is the habit of dividing the president’s top aides into the voices of reason (my term) and the “hot-heads.” A great example of this habit and the dangers it can foster, is Jonathan Stevenson’s February 21 New York Times column on President Trump’s appointment of Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster as his new White House national security adviser.

According to Stevenson – a national security veteran of the Obama administration – McMaster is a welcome addition to the voices of reason. In particular, his selection is portrayed as combining with that of former general Jim Mattis as Defense Secretary to strengthen a firewall against the “hot heads” (Stevenson’s term) that also have Mr. Trump’s ear.

Part of the reason Stevenson likes McMaster and Mattis et al is that he believes they will oppose “pointlessly disrupting” strategies and positions that he and many other establishment-arians (on both sides of the aisle) view as successes, or the best possible approaches – like the “One China” policy, the Iran nuclear deal, and immigration initiatives that seek to admit more refugees and other newcomers from the Middle East in hopes of winning hearts and minds in the Islamic world. I personally don’t agree with the Stevensonian/establishment view, but reasonable people can legitimately differ on these matters.

What’s much less reasonable, and genuinely dangerous, is Stevenson’s other reason for liking the world’s McMasters and Mattis’, and disliking its Stephen K. Bannon – the Trump aide who he and so many others view as a quintessential extremist and populist hot head. As the author sees it, McMaster is one of the national security professionals who will help make sure that American diplomacy won’t be unduly influenced by Trump-ists like Bannon. These ostensibly shallow, narrow-minded politicos supposedly see foreign policymaking not as an exercise in advancing and safeguarding the country’s most critical interests, but simply as a means of boosting or protecting a president’s popularity.

Although foreign policy can never be entirely separated from domestic politics – and in a democracy, shouldn’t be so separated – over-politicization can of course produce disaster. But Stevenson’s main historical example (the gradual escalation of the Vietnam War), and his analysis of the Trump administration, get literally everything important wrong. For example, two of his leading Vietnam villains (and those of Gen. McMaster) are then Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara and then national security adviser McGeorge Bundy. But far from being politicians who had any experience with the electoral process, or any apparent interest, they were quintessential establishment mandarins. In fact, it was their catastrophic advice that (rightly) turned “the best and the brightest” into a term of contempt.

The substance of their advice – chiefly, the championing of gradual escalation – can be faulted, too. But as Stevenson glosses over, this strategy enjoyed wide backing in the military, and not only among a group of military chiefs who McMaster and Stevenson dismiss as “inordinately politicized.”

Much more important, however, the fundamental mistake behind the Vietnam disaster was not the specific set of military tactics chosen, but the strategic decision to intervene militarily in the first place. And this choice reflected the strong internationalist consensus across the foreign policy establishment that, in the face of the Cold War community threat, every square inch of the globe had to be treated as a vital American interest, whether it held any specific geopolitical or economic significance to the United States or not.

Now fast forward to the present. Who’s more likely to embroil the United States into a needless military conflict that could spiral into a complete debacle? Mere “politicos” like Bannon – and his boss – who have complained (most recently in the Inaugural Address) that America has too often “defended other nations’ borders while refusing to defend our own”? Has “spent trillions of dollars overseas while America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay”?

Is a new Vietnam really what can be expected from a president who has declared, “We will seek friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world – but we do so with the understanding that it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first.

“We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it shine as an example for everyone to follow”?

For my money, I’d bet on the genuinely reckless foreign policy moves being advocated by figures from an establishment that, in the wake of Mr. Trump’s election, is doubling down on its support for internationalism – and therefore for the indiscriminate interventionism that logically follows from it. Indeed, lately this allegiance to internationalism has even blinded the establishment to rapidly mounting dangers from the pillars of post-World War II foreign policy – America’s security relationships with Europe and Asia.

In the former region, a completely unnecessary expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to include former Soviet republics and other nearby countries has committed the United States to protect lands that can be defended only by he threat of using nuclear weapons even though they have never been viewed as vital interests. In the process, of course, this NATO expansion has triggered a military and paramilitary reaction by Russia that has all of Europe on edge.

In Asia, America’s two likeliest adversaries – China and North Korea – are rapidly becoming capable of offsetting the nuclear weapons edge that has enabled Washington to protect countries like Japan and South Korea with little risk to the U.S. homeland. Ever more powerful nuclear forces now mean that Beijing and Pyongyang can use the credible threat of destroying American cities to deter U.S. military responses to any aggression they undertake.  (See this post for more detail – and for powerful evidence that Mr. Trump recognizes both problems.)

Indeed, in this respect, erring on the side of caution would involve President Trump siding with the America Firsters like Bannon – whatever short-term disruption their recommendations would bring – against the McMaster portrayed by Stevenson, and other establishmentarians he comfortingly but misleadingly labels as guardians of policy “stability.” That’s the last result that Washington will get from defining or simply wishing away lessons that have stared the nation and its leaders in the face for decades.