Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Biden’s Biggest Putin Summit Failure

Tags

Biden, China, Cold War, Democrats, election 2016, election interference, globalism, Henry Kissinger, impeachment, Nordstream 2, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, Trump-Russia, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin

Even though he’s just turned 98, I’m still surprised that none of the voluminous coverage and commentary on the just-concluded summit between President Biden and Russian leader Vladimir Putin featured any analysis from Henry Kissinger. Not that I agree with every policy decision or even strategy that the former Secretary of State and White House national security adviser favored – far from it.

But as I’ve written before, he’s one of the few first-rate analysts of U.S. foreign policy that I’ve encountered over my own decades in the field (and would have been even if in fact this bar was not so low). He’s still speaking out on these issues. And most important of all, Mr. Biden seems to have paid little attention either in the run-up to the Putin meeting and at the actual session (though of course, the details will long remain highly classified) to an historic insight that Kissinger helped contributed to American diplomacy whose core is as relevant as ever: the imperative of not needlessly antagonizing Russia and China at the same time. 

At this point, three big caveats need to be mentioned. First, it’s an imperative if U.S. foreign policy is to take a globalist course. That’s not my favored course, and under my kind of America First framework, the approach toward each of this powers would be substantially different. But the President is a died-in-the-wool globalist, so what counts most isn’t how his decisions compare with my preferences, but how well and coherently he’s pursuing his own strategy.

Second, there’s no question that Kissinger – and the rest of the bipartisan globalist U.S. foreign policy establishment – took the engage-with-China strategy way too, and indeed disastrously, too far. But at the time, and given the prevailing Cold War priorities both he and then President Nixon held, opening ties with China largely (but not exclusively) to complicate global matters for a Soviet Union feeling its oats, not only made good sense, but was long overdue.

And third, as suggested by my Cold War reference and my claim that U.S. China policy went way overboard, both national and international circumstances have changed dramatically.

Nonetheless, although China today is the rising behemoth facing the United States and post-Soviet Russia’s power is greatly diminished, the latter is still more than strong enough militarily and technologically to cause major problems for America. These range from aggressive designs on vulnerable new U.S. allies like the Baltic countries and Moscow’s former Warsaw Pact satellites, to damaging and disruptive hacks to America’s infrastructure. (I put election interference in a different box, since only extreme partisans believe that Russian operations made the difference in 2016.)

Since the China threat is far greater – and much more multidimensional – than the Russia threat, Mr. Biden has to date sensibly continued his predecessor’s policies of pushing back both militarily (in areas like the South China Sea) and economically (by keeping the Trump China tariffs and tech sanctions in place).

But he’s also spent his first months in office until this week seemingly determined to do his utmost to villify Russia and Putin verbally, apparently heedless of how his posture threatened to push Moscow and Beijing even closer together.

That’s not to say that a rapprochement between China and Russia didn’t take place during the Trump years. It did. (See, e.g., here.) And undoubtedly one big reason was that the Trump actions were much tougher than the Trump words. That’s true whether we’re talking about energy policy (where the former President’s encouragement of American independence gravely weakened the economies of Russia and other big foreign oil and gas producers), or Europe policy (where despite Trump’s scorn for America’s militarily free-riding allies, he beefed up the U.S. air and ground force and naval presence in and around Eastern Europe, right at Russia’s doorstep).

But unlike Mr. Biden to date, Trump also just as undoubtedly sought to contain disputes and even keep open the door to lowering tensions. And one key reason for this hostile posture can only be the flagrantly false claims from so many Democratic party politicians that Trump was excusing and even enabling Putin’s hostile actions out of gratitude for that election year assistance. President Biden eagerly joined the chorus, which tragically turned any outreach toward Russia toxic politically, and now he’s paying the piper – coming under fire from vengeful Republicans and other conservatives for even so modest and reasonable a decision as meeting Putin in person.

As a result, despite this recent report that “Biden fears what ‘best friends’ [Chinese leader] Xi and Putin could do together” and that “U.S. wariness over the Russia-China relationship has grown to the point where high-level American strategists are weighing how to factor it in as they try to reorient U.S. foreign policy to focus more on a rising China,” there’s not only no evidence that the subject came up in any serious way. It’s difficult at best to imagine that Mr. Biden could actually take any noteworthy steps in this direction without sparking (understandable) charges that he’s a Trump-like Putin lapdog, too. Just think of the reactions even in his own party to his recent decision to waive U.S. sanctions on finishing the Nordstream 2 natural gas pipeline, which as I’ve written, can only enrich Russia at the expense of Ukraine (whose security against Russian expansionism was declared vital to the United States itself by so many Democrats during the first Trump impeachment procedings).

An anti-American genuine Russia-China alliance is still no foregone conclusion. After all, countries bordering each other often have long histories of intense and often violent rivalries (like Russia and China). Dictators and would-be dictators like Putin and Xi Jinping rarely trust each other. As a result, countries headed by such authoritarians that are also next-door neighbors are especially unlikely partners.

But there’s also historically a great deal to the adage that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” And for the time being – and at an especially crucial juncture – Mr. Biden will struggle mightily to heed it. 

Im-Politic: Can Biden Really Solve the “Root Causes” Behind His Border Crisis?

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Biden, Border Crisis, border security, CAFTA, Central America, Central America Free Trade Agreement, Colbert I. King, Cold War, Donald Trump, El Salvador, foreign aid, George W. Bush, globalism, Guatemala, Honduras, Im-Politic, immigrants, Immigration, Jorge Castaneda, Kamala Harris, Lawence E. Harrison, migrants, Northern Triangle, race to the bottom, Trade, Washington Post

One of the time-honored practices – and myths – behind globalist U.S. foreign policies has been its faith that turmoil in various parts of the world that allegedly threatens American interests can be either eliminated or reduced to manageable levels with enough foreign aid. The idea is that such assistance will address the social and economic problems thought to be mainly to blame for the instability. So it’s no surprise that the globalist Biden administration has decided that aid programs are the keys to bringing immigration from Central America under control – though not of course right away.

As stated by Vice President Kamala Harris upon being tasked by President Biden to oversee U.S. effort to turn the counties of the region’s “Northern Triangle” into places whose populations won’t be determined to leave, the United States “must address the root causes that cause people to make the trek” northward.

That’s why I sure hope she reads Colbert I. King’s column in Tuesday’s Washington Post before she rolls up her sleeves too far. For as the author notes, the Biden administration plan to turn the Northern Triangle countries (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) from clearly failed states into (reasonable) success stories isn’t exactly new in its essentials.

And especially in recent years, when conditions in the region ostensibly worsened dramatically, and therefore fueled especially big migrants flows, there’s been no shortage of U.S. aid, especially considering the tiny size of the three economies.

As King details,

“Congress appropriated more than $3.6 billion to fund a Strategy for Engagement in Central America program between 2016 and 2021. The money was supposed to strengthen rule of law, improve the administration of justice, promote economic prosperity, prevent violence and combat gangs, and empower youth and women.

“>In fiscal 2021 alone, U.S. funding amounted to $505.9 million.

“>Between 2013 and 2018, The U.S. Agriculture Department allocated $407 million to Central America to provide school meals, nutritional programs for women, infants and children, and to train and provide technical assistance to improve agricultural productivity.

“>The Obama administration asked for money to help the region in fiscal 2016, and Congress appropriated $750 million, requiring the countries to improve border security, combat corruption and address human rights concerns.”

Then the author – properly – proceeds to ask “What happened to it all?” And what can the Biden administration do to make sure that the $4 billion it plans to spend in the region will work any better if Congress approves this sum?

Moreover, the case against more Central America aid as a Border Crisis game changer is actually stronger than King describes. Because Washington has not only been pouring money into the region for decades. It’s also granted these three Central American countries (and their regional neighbors) tariff cuts and other trade-related assistance aimed at enabling them to export their way to prosperity.

Indeed, as then President George W. Bush declared while lobbying for passage of the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) – which was eventually expanded to include the Dominican Republic,

“People have got to understand that by promoting policy that will help generate wealth in Central America, we’re promoting policy that will mean someone is less–more likely to stay at home to find a job. If you’re concerned about immigration to this country, then you must understand that CAFTA and the benefits of CAFTA will help create new opportunity in Central American countries, which will mean someone will be able to find good work at home, somebody will be able to provide for their family at home, as opposed to having to make the long trip to the United States. CAFTA is good immigration policy as well as good trade policy.”

Critics can reasonably argue that these U.S. programs failed to achieve their immigration aims because they were poorly designed. On the aid front, it’s true that too much of the assistance provided by the United States during the Cold War was military or other security assistance that largely helped corrupt governments repress their own people – and fight rebels labeled as tools of the Soviet Union and Cuba.

When it comes to trade, globalist U.S. Presidents did Central America no favors, either. For CAFTA simply plunged the region into a frantic race to the bottom in wages and worker safety that had been sparked by the decision to free up trade indiscriminately with all the very low-income countries (including China, India, and Bangladesh) that also produced the apparel products that have represented Central America’s best hope for prospering via globalization.

At the same time, significant U.S. assistance for Central America continued after the Cold War’s end, and more was targeted at economic development. And the Biden administration has said nothing about U.S. trade policy reforms that actually would give the Northern Triangle – or the rest of Central America for that matter, or Mexico – major legs up on non-Western Hemisphere competitors.

All of which could support the conclusion that no amount of aid or trade breaks can make Central America successful. A globalist administration will be particularly loathe to accept this admittedly depressing proposition, but there’s abundant evidence in its favor. The work of development economist Lawrence E. Harrison, to cite one leading example, has compellingly argued that some counties – and entire regions – simply don’t have what it takes to achieve economic success because of the cultures they’ve evolved.

At the same time, as my friend – and noted political scientist and former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda – has argued, the Central American economies are so small that enough smartly spent U.S. money might be able to overcome even these deep-rooted obstacles.

I can’t say that I know the answer. But the analyses of King, Harrison, and Castaneda all point to the overarching conclusion that the kind of business-as-usual version of the address-the-root-causes of Central America’s failings being contemplated by the Biden administration can’t possibly stem the migrant flow. Moreover, until genuinely promising plans are developed, there will be no substitute for re-securing the border by reinstating the type of Trump-ian controls that minimize the strength of the U.S. magnets that influence migrant flows as surely as the problems of sending countries.

 

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: An America Last Troop Agreement with South Korea

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alliances, allies, Biden, China, Cold War, deterrence, Donald Trump, Japan, North Korea, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, South Korea, Soviet Union, tripwire

The United States and South Korea have negotiated an agreement on sharing the cost of basing U.S. troops on the peninsula, and the outcome raises the question of why the Biden administration bothered to negotiate in the first place. For the agreement simply endorsed the offer made by the Koreans under the Trump administration. In fact, it clearly signaled to America’s other security allies that under Mr. Biden, the United States will revert to its pre-Trump policies of permitting them to skimp on outlays for their own defense, thereby needlessly exposing the American homeland to the risk of nuclear attack by the adversaries these alliances are supposed to resist.

Let’s begin by remembering why the link between these decades-old alliances and nuclear risk exist in the first place. As I’ve written repeatedly (and most comprehensively here), it resulted from an early-Cold War period American decision to give up on the hugely expensive idea of using U.S. conventional military forces to deter threats posed by the old Soviet Union, China, and North Korea, and rely instead on intimidating these foes by brandishing nuclear swords.

Non-nuclear U.S. forces, however, still played a vital role in this strategy. Their purpose was serving as “tripwires.” It was the prospect of their being destroyed by their superior enemies that was deemed likely to spur U.S. Presidents to use the nukes to save them, and creating the prospect of escalation to full-scale, intercontinental nuclear exchanges that would prevent the initial aggression to begin with.

Of course, if such deterrence failed, and a full-scale nuclear war broke out, the U.S. homeland would probabl become a casualty. But in those days, the gambit wasn’t completely crazy. In the first place, the security of the allies being protected (mainly Western Europe and Japan) was arguably vital to America’s own security. In the second place, for most of the Cold War, the United States possessed either a nuclear monopoly over the potential adversaries, a meaningful edge, or parity. And even the latter was considered adequate to keep the nuclear retaliation threat credible. In the third place, during the early Cold War decades, the allies – all of which were devastated by World War II – simply couldn’t mount serious defenses of their own.

These days, though, the alliances situation has changed dramatically. Most of the allies can still be considered vital assets for the United States. And all of them are now wealthy enough to build militaries capable of self-defense. But they choose not to, preferring instead to rely on those American military tripwires to deter attack and use their national resources elsewhere, thereby ensuring the continuing nuclear threat to the United States.

Significantly, the major ally that always and still has the least significance to America’s safety and well-being has been South Korea. In addition, the ally-adversary wealth gap is clearly widest between South Korea and its economically impoverished, Stalinist northern neighbor. But because of Seoul’s defense free-riding, because North Korea now has built an impressive nuclear arsenal and is nearing the capability of reaching the continental United States with its missiles, and because not even the alliance-skeptical Trump administration elected to remove the tripwire and thus eliminate any reason for North Korea to threaten, much less actually strike, U.S. targets, the alliance-related nuclear danger to America remains and (given North Korea’s unpredictability, could well be greatest) where running this risk is least justifiable.

Not that the Trumpers ignored the situation completely. Before his administration began, the former President did reveal some awareness of alliance-related nuclear security problems – especially in Asia. And although this theme quickly vanished from the list of stated Trump alliance concerns, he did vigorously press all the major allies, including South Korea, to boost their military budgets and pay more of the costs of hosting U.S. forces. In fact, during his term, the former President continued his pre-inauguration threats to remove some of the American forces from South Korea in order to turn up the heat on Seoul. (He actually ordered a troop drawdown from Germany for the same reasons).

The allies – including South Korea – and their enthusiasts in the bipartisan globalist U.S. foreign policy establishment predictably cried “foul,” contending that Trump had turned American alliance policy into a base exercise in “transactionalism” and “shakedowns,” and none more loudly than candidate Joe Biden last year. In an October op-ed for a South Korean new agency he made clear his determination to return to pre-Trump coddling regardless of the nuclear risk to his own country.

“As President,” he promised, “I’ll stand with South Korea, strengthening our alliance to safeguard peace in East Asia and beyond, rather than extorting Seoul with reckless threats to remove our troops.”

And unfortunately for anyone who would put America’s security first, he’s been true to his word. The latest agreement specifying South Korea’s payment level for the 28,500 American troops stationed in harm’s way right up against the Demilitarized Zone that divides the peninsula had run out in 2019. Deadlocking the talks since then had been Trump’s insistience that Seoul roughly quintuple its last agreed-on figure of about $920 million annually to about $5 billion, and consent to renegotiating the amounts each year rather than every five years. (One news account reported that this demand didn’t come from Trump himself, and that the administration eventually decided to call for a 50 percent first-year hike.)

Biden’s solution? Secure a marginal increase from 13 percent to 13.9 percent in the last annual payments offer reportedly made by South Korea. Thereafter, Seoul will boost its yearly contributions at the same rate as it increases its defense budget – which of course by definition remains woefully inadequate, since despite some recent military spending progress clearly spurred by America First-fueled anxieties, it would still require South Korea to depend on American support. (Incidentally, different accounts of the exact terms have been reported here and here.)

The result? The South Koreans are happy that the Biden administration is dealing with them in “ mutually beneficial and rational manner” and not in “a transactional fashion.” A State Department spokesperson was tickled that the deal has kept the “Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment to reinvigorating and modernizing our democratic alliances around the word to advance our shared security and prosperity.” The Mainstream Media’s globalism cheerleaders are impressed that Mr Biden is farsightedly willing to “cut allies a break to build unity in competition against China and Russia.”

And Americans are still one temper tantrum by Kim Jong Un away from either sitting by and watching nearly 30,000 of their soldiers overrun in an invasion, or trying to save them from total destruction and South Korea from armed conquest with nuclear attacks that could bring a North Korean warhead down on a major American city…or two…or three.

P.S. All indications are that the Biden administration is going to stage a rerun with Japan – though as indicated above, this ally is at least more important than South Korea.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Mr. President, U.S. Dealings with China are No Game

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alliances, allies, Antony Blinken, Asia-Pacific, Biden, China, Cold War, democracy, Donald Trump, Indo-Pacific, Jake Sullivan, Kurt M. Campbell, national interests, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Soviet Union

For literally decades, American foreign policy makers, and especially the pre-Trump globalists, fell into the dangerous habit of obsessing about second-order questions (like whether the old Soviet Union was a fundamentally aggressive or defensively-oriented power, whether military force or diplomacy was the nation’s most effective foreign policy tool, whether unilateral or multilateral actions were most likely to succeed, and whether a more or less involvement in world affairs was preferable).

As a result, they typically neglected the paramount first-order questions: Principally, what overseas goals does the United States need to achieve to secure adequate levels of safety and well-being? In other words, which foreign objectives matter decisively for the United States in and of themselves, and which don’t? And those are first-order question because assessing others’ intentions is much more guesswork than science, and because no one can sensibly choose tools for a job without knowing what job they want to do.

(See this 1985 FOREIGN POLICY essay and this 1991 Atlantic Monthly article on the general failure of not only American leaders but of presumed foreign policy experts to think rigorously about national interests. See this 1991 New York Times piece about the hazards of divining intentions as opposed to capabilities. Apologies if the first two are no longer available for free on-line.)

Therefore, it’s awfully depressing to see the Biden administration staging its own version of backwards strategizing. It’s evidently determined to base its China policy on figuring out what kind of relationship it wants with the People’s Republic, and paying much less attention to identifying specific actions the United States wants China to take, stop, and refrain from in the first place.

The Biden approach is completely mistaken for two main reasons. First, whenever relationships are pursued regardless of their impact on particular, concrete interests, these national needs and wants inevitably become subordinated to atmospherics and abstractions and processes – a decidedly unpromising recipe for national success.

Second, the particular relationship on which President Biden and his top aides are focusing – one marked by competition – is so intrinsically ambivalent (especially in the realm of world affairs) that its much likelier to confuse than to provide useful policy guidance. In addition, competition is a concept that evokes the playing field, where both victory and defeat have ultimately trivial consequences, rather than the fundamentally anarchic and much more dangerous international landscape. Consequently, its use tends to downplay even stakes otherwise defined more threateningly.

These obstacles to clear foreign policy thinking and numerous others all rear their heads in statements the new President and his leading advisers have made during the campaign and transition, and since Inauguration Day.

For instance, Jake Sullivan and Kurt M. Campbell, who have become, respectively, Mr. Biden’s White House national security adviser and National Security Council “czar” for the Asia-Pacific region, perceptively noted in a prominent 2019 article that terms used by the Trump administration like “strategic competition,” unless elaborated on, can’t help but connote “uncertainty about what that competition is over and what it means to win.”

They did write of the need to decide what “kinds of interests the United States wants to secure.” And they do dance around some specific objectives, like maintaining unimpeded navigation in Asia-Pacific (or, to use a term more expanive and popular lately because it includes India – “Indo-Pacific”) waters, and preventing China from taking over Taiwan, and safeguarding America’s global technology leadership. 

But the authors also drone on and on about achieving a state of coexistence that “would involve elements of competition and cooperation, with the United States’ competitive efforts geared toward securing those favorable terms” (but never absolutely committed to securing them); and about “accepting competition as a condition to be managed rather than a problem to be solved”; and about how the Chinese competitive challenge differs from its Cold War-era Soviet counterpart; and about how China has become an “essential partner” as well as a formidable competitor with the United States because of the appearance of shared global dangers like climate change and pandemics; and about an “emerging” global contest of social and economic models; and about how to “get the balance between competition and cooperation right.” Indeed, the piece is titled “Competition Without Catastrophe.”

In addition, last year, new Secretary of State Antony Blinken took pains in a lengthy interview to emphasize that although “we are in competition with China,” there’s “nothing wrong with competition if it’s fair” That point is entirely valid in the context of a sporting event, a spelling bee, or other forms of competition with relatively trivial consequences.

At best, however, it’s deeply puzzling when dealing with decisions that can bring either great benefit or harm to an entire nation, and that can create major risks and require massive expenditures of national blood and treasure. In cases where winning and losing matter considerably and even vitally, it should be obvious, that prevailing or figuring out how to cope with defeat are worth the candle. Yet if and when it’s the fairness of the outcome that matters most rather than the outcome itself, why bother competing at all? Worse, these efforts can produce inexcusable wastes of resources that will surely be invaluable in the more important situations sure to come somewhere down the line.

In one instance reminiscent of the Cold War thinking they generally criticize in the China context, Campbell and Sullivan write that winning that competition of social and economic models with Beijing counts significantly because the United States (in unspecified ways to be sure) will be much better off in a world mainly made up of free market democracies than in one dominated by countries that try to emulate China’s totalitarianism.

Their point is fortified by the leading role advanced surveillance systems play in China, which additionally means that the United States must stay ahead in these fields both in order to ensure military superiority when push comes to shove, and to defend itself against Chinese cyber-aggression. Moreover, intuition and common decency lead all Americans to root for the widest possible global triumph of political and economic freedom (realizing of course that the latter can be defined in many different ways).

Even here, though, the framing U.S. strategy as a competition with China can complicate as many choices as it clarifies. For example, a defining principle of Biden foreign policy is that, in the President’s words, “America’s alliances are our greatest asset” in world affairs. Yet if so, then the new administration, as with its Cold War predecessors, will need to recognize that many of its current and desired partners won’t be either political or economic democracies or even close (in Asia, Communist-ruled Vietnam and the quasi-at-best democracies of Thailand and the Philippines come to mind), and that today’s genuine democracies often feel free – as during the Cold War – to ignore or actually undermine U.S. interests (like Germany nowadays regarding both China and Russia).

Finally, it’s all too easy to conclude that the Biden-ites’ focus on second-order questions first and foremost represents a series of word games aimed at masking their inability or unwillingness to identify first-order issues. Take the President’s insistence that he’ll carry out an “extreme competition” with China. Even leaving aside that he immediately proceeded to trivialize the term by declaring that his approach will differ from Donald Trump’s by focusing on “international rules of the road” (another second-order priority), what exactly will be “extreme”? And how does his definition of extreme competition compare with the other varieties of competition detailed by Sullivan and Campbell?

Similarly, Blinken has just ventured that the U.S. relationship with China entails “adversarial,” “competitive,” and “cooperative” aspects. The last category is no mystery. But what’s the difference between the first and the second? Does the first refer to American interests that must be advanced or defended at all costs and risks, or at least major costs and risks? Does the second refer to those situations and interactions where fairness is overriding? 

Sullivan and Blinken in particular admit that they used to belong to the dangerously naive China engagement mainstream of the U.S. foreign and economic policy communities.  But until they, their colleagues, and the President stop talking about the China challenge as if it was a game, ample doubt will be justified as to whether they’ve yet become China realists.           

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: Trump’s Potentially Disastrous Germany Troops Decision

Tags

America First, Cold War, deterrence, free-riding, Germany, military spending, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, nuclear war, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Poland, The Wall Street Journal, tripwire, Trump

So where will President Trump send those U.S. troops he’ll be moving out of  Germany? That may sound like an odd question to post about, given the widespread anti-racism and police brutality protests in the United States, still deeply depressed activity across the national economy, some signs of a CCP Virus second wave, and of course the intensifying presidential election campaign.

But precisely because, as Americans hopefully are learning, crises can spring up seemingly out of nowhere, it’s a crucial subject to examine. For if President Trump comes up with the wrong answer – as is entirely possible based on what’s known so far – the stage could be set for a terrifying and completely needless nuclear showdown with Russia that could all too easily result in a nuclear attack on the U.S. homeland. And in a supreme irony, these dangers all stem from what’s been shaping up as one of the President’s sharpest and most dangerous departures from the America First principles on which he’s based much of his foreign policy.

But let’s begin at the beginning. As first reported last week in The Wall Street Journal, and pretty strongly confirmed last week, the President has decided to reduce the numbers of active duty American servicemen and women stationed permanently in Germany from 34,500 to 25,000, and cap this presence at that level.

If the troops would be heading further west on the European continent, or heading back home, that would be great news for Americans, as it would dramatically reduce nuclear war risk. As I’ve frequently written, for decades, (although in much greater numbers during the Cold War), U.S. forces have been deployed in Germany not to defend Germany militarily, but to function as a tripwire.

That is, American policymakers were under no illusion that these units would strong enough (even in tandem with the forces of U.S. allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization – NATO – like Germany) to beat back an attack from the conventional forces of the Soviet Union and its satellite allies. But Washington believed that the U.S. presence in West Germany – which bordered then-Communist East Germany) would deter a Soviet attack in the first place precisely because of its vulnerability. Specifically, the specter of American soldiers being  decimated would force an American President to try saving them with nuclear weapons. The resulting prospect of the conflict threatening to escalate to the all-out nuclear leve – which would destroy the Soviet Union, too –  would supposedly be enough to keep Moscow at bay.

As I’ve also written, this strategy arguably made sense during the Cold War, when its aim was keeping in the free world camp West Germany and Western Europe and all of its formidable economic power and therefore military potential. Today, however, it not only makes no sense from a U.S. standpoint. It has become positively deranged, as the likeliest targets of post-Soviet Russian aggression (and the arenas where the U.S. forces would likeliest be sent if the shooting starts) are not the longstanding NATO members of Western Europe. Instead, they’d be sent to the newer NATO members of Eastern Europe – most of which border Russia, but whose security was never viewed as a vital U.S. interest (that is, worth risking war over), even in the Cold War days.

Even less excusably, sizable American forces have remained in Germany and elsewhere in Western Europe in part because Germany and most of the other allies keep skimping so shamefully on their own militaries – even though most have hardly been short of resources.

No ally has been a more disgraceful military free-rider than uber-wealthy Germany, and the President has been right to complain about German and broader stinginess, and to threaten major consequences if the allies’ defense budgets aren’t significantly boosted. But as I’ve also explained, he’s focused on the wrong objective: securing a fairer deal for U.S. taxpayers.

Instead, all along, he should have been seeking the removal of the American military either from Europe altogether, or its transfer far enough from the front lines to reduce meaingfully the odds of it getting entrapped in a new East-West conflict immediately. For those are the kinds of moves that would shrink to insignificance the chances of the United States getting hit by Russian nuclear warheads because of a combination of its forces being placed in a completely impossible position militarily, and because U.S. allies have been too cheap to pay for their own security.

Worst of all, though, far from moving U.S. forces away from the front lines of a Russian attack, Mr. Trump consistently has been moving them closer, by cautiously but steadily stationing more in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. And numerous reports have suggested that Poland is exactly where at least some of the 9,500 U.S. troops leaving Germany will be heading.

Because a final decision to transfer the troops to Poland hasn’t been made yet, there’s still hope that this potentially disastrous mistake can be avoided. But that outcome seems unlikely without a serious intervention from a Trump advisor influential enough to produce an about-face. Anyone out there know how I can get a hold of Jared, Ivanka, or Melania?

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: How Bad Will it Get?

Tags

Baby Boom, CCP Virus, Cold War, coronavirus, COVID 19, Edward Harrison, Federal Reserve, Great Depression, Great Recession, health security, military spending, moral hazard, recession, recovery, secular stagnation, small business, start-ups, technology, Trump, uncertainty, unemployment, World War II, Wuhan virus, {What's Left of) Our Economy

How bad economically? That’s a CCP Virus-related question everyone’s understandably asking these days. In fact, last night one of my social media friends expressed the super-bear case pretty compellingly:

“I can’t see any way this is not going to destroy us. No one will have any money, so they won’t buy anything, won’t pay their bills, can’t pay rent or mortgages. No spending power means no employment. More layoffs. certainly as soon as stores open there wil be a rush to sell everything, a rush to normal, hoping for the best, but I think this is pretty much The End of life as we know it.”

And an economy-watcher I know with an unusually good feel for finance is awfully pessimistic, too – and has been right so far about the virus’ impact on output, employment, and the markets.

I’m feeling even less confident than usual in my economy crystal ball (that’s a low bar). The main reason of course is that the current U.S. nosedive, as I (and nearly everyone else) have observed, isn’t a standard recession or depression. That is, it hasn’t been caused either by some built-in weakness in the economy that finally becomes too big to ignore or paper over, or similar problems in the financial system that wind up wrecking the “real economy.” We can’t even blame the current crisis on some outside economic shock, like the boost in global oil prices that wreaked such economic havoc in the 1970s.

Even so, here are four somewhat related, extremely tentative thoughts that I hope will help readers form their own judgments about the American economy’s future. Spoiler alert: They’re pretty pessimistic.

First, the fundamentally biological nature of the crisis creates the kind of uncertainty that’s unprecedented in modern times, and that consumers, businesses, and investors will hate even more than usual. For example, what if there’s a second wave? Or a third? How will these three groups of economic actors respond to attempted restarts of economic activity that, however gradual or rolling, turn out to be premature?

Worse, what if the CCP Virus is here to stay for the time being, and treatments can only become good enough to reduce it to the status of a really nasty flu? And what if it mutates into something requiring qualitatively different cures?

Second, because of all these possible biology-rooted uncertainties, I fear that many of the standard arguments for expecting a relatively quick, strong rebound should be thrown out the window. All of them, after all – including President Trump’s – apparently assume that the timeout mandated in most of the economy’s consumption (and that therefore inevitably undermines its business spending) is creating lots of frustrated demand that will burst into actual spending once the crisis passes.

One big historical precedent cited: the aftermath of World War II. At that time, officials inside the federal government feared that growth would fizzle at best for two main reasons. First, the massive boost to growth and employment delivered by wartime military spending would dramatically fade. Second, this pessimism was no doubt greatly reenforced by the nation’s immediate pre-war experience – a lengthy and deep depression that showed no signs of ending until the global fascist threat inspired a pre-Pearl Harbor military buildup.

But after the war, consumption came back with a vengeance – because the main threats on everyone’s mind were decisively defeated; because so many Americans had lots of income to spend; because Washington laid the ground for more income-earning with programs like the G.I. Bill, along with war-time advances in science and technology that boasted phenomenal peacetime uses; and because baby-making boomed along with consumption, juicing demand for more housing in particular.

And let’s not forget the Cold War! The household spending binge did slow in 1947 and 1948. But by 1949, defense spending began rising again, and it really took off from 1951 on, once the Korean War in particular convinced policymakers that a global Communist threat was alive and here to stay.

Today, however, determining when the major threat is finally over is much more difficult. Unemployment is sure to rise much higher than the 5.9 percent pre-Korean War peak (in 1949), meaning that not only will incentives to save remain stronger, but that much more income is being lost. And nothing like a post-World War II Baby Boom was even in sight before the CCP Virus struck. Indeed, the arrows were pointing in the opposite direction. A post-virus repeat seems unimaginable.

The one interesting possible reason for purely economic optimism? A new military spending surge – perhaps spurred by worries about China? And new healthcare products investment might jump as well, possibly boosted by government incentives, to prevent a repeat of current supply shortages.

The third consideration weighing on my mind is the separation factor. Even if post-virus improvement is solid, I wonder how sustainable it will be. The main reason is that, at least during past episodes of major job loss (e.g., the last decade’s Great Recession that followed the global financial crisis), many of the unemployed face big difficulties returning to work in any form, and particular difficulties finding work at previous pay levels. Because the longer unemployment lasts, the harder these obstacles generally become, and because of the likely rate joblessness is likely to hit, this separation factor could become considerable even if unemployment insurance and other income supports do turn out to be generous enough to sustain such economic victims until the nation reaches “the other side.” 

The separation factor, moreover, may go beyond workers. I don’t by any means rule out the possibility that significant numbers of small business owners may call it quits, too – either because cratering demand for their products and services will kill off their enterprises, because the the government aid being offered doesn’t cover all their losses for long enough, or because they conclude that applying for the aid just isn’t worth the candle.

Sure, new start-ups will fill part of this gap. But all of it? Not if the abundant pre-crisis evidence of a significant drop-off in such entrepreneurism is any indication.

Fourth, also reenforcing the bear case: Although the roots of the current economic mess are dramatically different from those of the last near-meltdown and recession, the “whatever it takes” response of the federal government and the Federal Reserve are remarkably similar. As pointed out by Edward Harrison, the economy- and finance-watcher I cited above, on the one hand, the authorities probably don’t have a choice. On the other, this thick, pervasive safety net did produce an epidemic of “moral hazard” – financial decisions in particular that turn out to be bad but that initially look smart because confidence in some form of bailout reduces the perceived risks and costs of mistakes.

As I explained previously, the last outbreak of moral hazard took a painful pre-virus economic toll, as the resulting inefficient use of capital helped produce  one of the weakest economic recoveries American history. In fact, it’s produced a theory that I personally find as convincing as it is depressing (personally): secular stagnation. It holds that the economy has become so fundamentally unproductive and inefficient that the only way it’s been able to generate even adequate (not especially strong) levels of growth has been for government to inflate bubbles of various kinds (with all its moral hazard-creating spending and guarantees) that, of course, eventually burst. So it doesn’t seem at all unreasonable to believe that the upcoming recovery will be similarly feeble.

Even worse, according to Harrison, even the current official backstopping might not suffice to prevent defaults by the financially weakest businesses – which would generate their own harmful spillover effects.

I’m not saying that there’s no case for optimism – at least cautious optimism. The overall long-term historical momentum for improvement in living conditions the world over is very impressive. As a result, doom-saying has a lousy record in the post-World War II period in particular. Technological advance isn’t going to stop, and may not even slow much. Maybe most important, at least in the medium-term, the human desire to acquire and consume shows no signs of having vanished.

So maybe the safest conclusion to come to (however unsatisfyingly timid): This time won’t be completely different. But don’t bet on a simple, and particularly a quick, return to pre-virus times.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Globalists’ Dangerous Tantrums over Syria and Ukraine

Tags

America First, Cold War, Eastern Europe, FDR, Franklin D. Roosevelt, globalism, globalists, Harry S Truman, ISIS, jihadis, Middle East, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, Soviet Union, spheres of influence, Syria, terrorism, Trump, Turkey, Ukraine, Vietnam, World War II, Yalta

If you know more than a little something about contemporary American history, you’ve no doubt been struck (or you should be struck if you haven’t been already) by the close resemblance in one key respect between the firestorms around the two big foreign policy-related uproars of the day these days, and the big foreign policy uproar of the late 1940s and early 1950s: The cries of “Betrayal” and “Backstabbing!” generated by President Trump’s withdrawal of the small American troop deployment in Syria, and his lack of interest in keeping Ukraine fully independent of Russian designs, fully recall similar charges that followed Washington’s early Cold War acquiescence in the Soviet Union’s establishment of control over Eastern Europe.

And there’s a very good reason for the similarities among these over-the-top reactions in all three cases – today’s version of which is all too capable of pushing the nation into repeating catastrophic foreign policy mistakes. In all of them, a combination of immutable geography and irrefutable common sense has established ironclad limits on American power. In all of them, America’s existential security and prosperity rendered these limits entirely acceptable. And in all, crusading globalists have reacted not with gratitude for the nation’s favored circumstances, but with tantrums that have slandered any support for the prudence logically suggested by these circumstances as evidence of treason and/or degeneracy. It’s the policy equivalent of refusing to take “Yes” for an answer.  (See this 2018 article of mine for the fullest statement of these views.) 

The Cold War event mainly responsible for the McCarthyite claims of spies and traitors shot through the U.S. government was Yalta conference of 1945 held by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his British and Soviet counterparts Winston S. Churchill and Josef V. Stalin,  At that late-World War II meeting in Crimea, FDR agreed to accept Moscow’s clam to the countries located between German and Soviet territory as a sphere of influence.

Roosevelt’s decision reflected his awareness that the enormous Red Army had planted stakes in Eastern Europe after having fought it way through the region on its way to Berlin, that it had no intention of leaving, and that dislodging these forces militarily at remotely acceptable cost was impossible. Interestingly, his successor Harry S Truman fully agreed, even though by the time he became President, the United States enjoyed a monopoly on nuclear weapons.

“Yalta,” however, became a synonym for treason for many Americans, and the next few years (including under the Democrats) became an time of loyalty oaths, persecution, and show trials, Although many of the charges that the U.S. government had become a nest of spies turned out to be true, “McCarthyism” nonetheless ruined numerous innocent lives as well, and for more than a decade stifled badly needed dissent within the national security bureaucracy.

But guess what? Despite Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and the mass, multi-generation human tragedy that unfolded behind the Iron Curtain, the United States not only survived but generally prospered. Further, the serious problems it did experience had absolutely nothing to do with the fates of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, or even the former East Germany etc.

Self-interest and restraint in foreign policy go hand-in-hand just as neatly these days when it comes to Ukraine and Syria. As I’ve written, even more than Eastern Europe, Ukraine’s independence has never been considered a vital American interest because it’s never been a significant determinant of the nation’s safety or well-being; because it’s located even closer to the center of Russian military might than Eastern Europe; because as a result the United States is militarily incapable of mounting a sane challenge with conventional forces; and because on top of these assets, Moscow has long possessed nuclear forces that can obliterate the United States many times over.

As for Syria, Mr. Trump’s critics are caught in one or both intellectual time warps. The first has hurled them back to the era when the United States was thoroughly addicted to Middle East oil. However long it lasted, though, it’s now unmistakably over, thanks to the fossil fuels production revolution of the last decade or so.

It’s true that this oil still matters a great deal to Europe and East Asia, huge chunks of a global economy whose health still matters in turn to the United States (though less lately, since both regions seem chronically incapable of or unwilling to generate acceptable growth other than by amassing enormous – and unsustainable trade surpluses with America). But both regions are eminently capable of fielding the military forces needed to preserve the oil flow. P.S. So do the Middle East’s two biggest powers, Saudi Arabia and Iran. Their deadly struggle for geopolitical supremacy notwithstanding, both would collapse economically without the revenue brought in by their oil exports. Just ask Iran, which is being bankrupted by President Trump’s – unilateral – sanctions.

The second time warp has the foreign policy Never Trump-ers trapped in the early post-September 11 period, when the nation discovered its shocking vulnerability to Middle East-borne terrorism. Yet as I’ve repeatedly written, and experience can not have made clearer, the best way by far to protect the American homeland from this deadly threat is not continuing to chase jihadist groups around an uncontrollable region whose terminal dysfunction will keep them appearing and reconstituting, but securing America’s far more controllable borders.

Additionally, though less important, terrorist organizations like ISIS and Al Qaeda have been blessed with the unique gift of antagonizing every other significant actor in the Middle East, for either ethnic (Arab versus Persian versus Turk) or religious (Sunni versus Shia Muslims) reasons. And the Russians, who are now supposedly the new kingpins in the Middle East, have no interest in seeing a serious jihadist revival on their borders. So an American exit from the region will leave it full of countries with every reason to sit on Islamic lunatics, not to mention rife with their own mutual antagonisms and historic rivalries. A chaotic balance of power to be sure, but an entirely durable one. (These arguments have just been made powerfully here.)

During the Cold War, it took debacle in Vietnam, with all the devastation it brought to America’s economy, society, and domestic and national security institutions (some of which still haven’t fully recovered), to teach globalists and the public they led, that geography and common sense mustn’t be completely ignored. Let’s all hope that their America First-oriented opponents, including a critical mass of the body politic, can keep them away from the levers of power before they produce a similar disaster.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Why a Real America First European Security Policy is More Urgent than Ever

Tags

alliances, America First, Article Five, Cato Institute, China, Cold War, coupling, EU, Europe, European Council on Foreign Relations, European Union, extended deterrence, globalism, NATO. North Atlantic Treaty Organization, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Pew Research Center, Russia, Ted Galen Carpenter, tripwires, Trump

Even if the Cato Institute’s Ted Galen Carpenter wasn’t one of my closest friends, I’d still be writing this post highlighting his op-ed piece earlier this week for the Washington Post. Because it absolutely decimates the claim that all that ails the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), America’s oldest national security alliance, is recklessly mindless norms-buster Donald Trump.

Instead, Carpenter reports on overwhelming evidence that the arrangement, which since 1949 has committed the United States to the defense of first Western Europe and now most of Europe (and at considerable risk of nuclear attack on the U.S. homeland), is critically ill mainly because, in the decades since the end of the Cold War, U.S. and European interests have been steadily – and inevitably – diverging. And these findings add powerfully to the case that America’s globalist military commitment to Europe has become dangerously outdated.

The evidence consists of polling data showing unmistakably that European publics no longer believe that their governments should side with the United States in its disputes and conflicts with Russia (whose perceived threat Western Europe’s independence during its post-World War II decades as the Soviet Union sparked NATO’s creation in the first place), or that they should even rally to each other’s defense.

The Russia-focused results come from a September survey conducted by the European Council on Foreign Relations, and are based on the views of no less than 60,000 individuals from fourteen countries belonging to the European Union (EU) – an economic organization not officially related to NATO but many of whose member countries are U.S. NATO allies as well.

The bottom line – which Carpenter rightly describes as “startling”? “When asked ‘Whose side should your country take in a conflict between the United States and Russia?’ the majority of respondents in all 14 E.U. countries said ‘neither’.”

Some of the country-specific results?

“In France, only 18 percent would back the United States, while 63 percent opt for neutrality; in Italy, it’s 17 percent vs. 65 percent, and in Germany, 12 percent to 70 percent.

“The results were similar even in NATO’s newer East European members, despite their greater exposure to Russian pressure and potential aggression. Hungarian respondents selected neutrality over supporting the United States 71 percent to 13 percent, while Romanians did so 65 percent to 17 percent. Even in Poland, a country whose history with Moscow during both the Czarist and Soviet periods was especially frosty, neutralist sentiment had the edge, 45 percent to 33 percent.”

What’s especially disturbing, and indeed outrageous, from an American standpoint is that since NATO’s founding, European governments have insisted that U.S. troops be stationed on the continent to serve (as in South Korea) in a trip-wire role – which RealityChek regulars knows means units deployed close enough to invasion routes and vulnerable enough to the superior conventional militaries of aggressors practically to force American Presidents to use nuclear weapons to save them if conflict breaks out.

This policy of “extended deterrence,” or “coupling,” has been intended to prevent such conflicts from breaking out in the first place. What’s dangerous for the United States of course – and needlessly so – is that if deterrence fails, nuclear weapons use could expose American territory to a retaliatory nuclear strike, even though the United States itself may not be at risk.

Even worse: Throughout the Cold War, NATO non-nuclear forces were inferior to their Soviet and Soviet satellite counterparts because the European allies preferred to free-ride on the U.S. military guarantee instead of spending funds they all could have afforded for armed forces capable of self-defense.

For good measure, moreover, this European Council on Foreign Relations poll showed that Europeans are just about as ambivalent in joining with the United States if a conflict with China broke out.

Of course, even though the lopsided nature of the results indicates that these European views have been long in the making, it’s not entirely crazy to believe that Mr. Trump’s election has been so alarming to these populations that the shift did actually begin with his 2016 victory. But as Carpenter points out, a survey from the Pew Research Center conducted in 2015 demonstrates that NATO’s core principles were in deep trouble in Europe well before the President even declared his candidacy for the Oval Office.

Pew sampled opinion in eight NATO members and found that 49 percent of respondents opposed their country coming to the defense of other allies. And majorities in key alliance members France, Italy, and Germany alike rejected “fulfilling their country’s obligation to fulfill the Article 5 treaty pledge to consider an attack on any NATO member as an attack on all.” Crucially, Article 5 of the NATO treaty embodies the notion of collective security. In other words, it literally makes NATO NATO.

Carpenter rightly concludes that “the concept of transatlantic solidarity, even on collective defense, is now largely confined to out-of-touch political elites on both sides of the Atlantic.” Just as important, he notes that “it will be hard to sustain policies that increasingly run counter to the wishes of popular majorities.”

Ironically, however, despite his harsh criticisms of NATO allies’ free-riding and periodic swipes at the alliance as possibly obsolete, President Trump is increasingly acting like one of those out-of-touch globalist mainstays who urgently needs to see these poll results. For despite the warnings sounded by these polls that the United States won’t be able to rely on the European governments and their militaries even if shooting breaks out in Europe, he’s actually strengthened American forces on the continent – including in Poland, right on the Russian border.

In other words, an avowedly America First President is binding his country’s fate to that of Europe at the very moment when disengagement is more important than ever.

Im-Politic: George Bush’s Biggest Legacy

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alliances, America First, Cold War, George H.W. Bush, globalism, Im-Politic, international institutions, The Atlantic, The National Interest

OK, so that newspaper op-ed on the U.S.-China trade truce I mentioned in yesterday’s post won’t be appearing on-line till tonight. That enables me to sound off about the other big news of the past weekend: the passing of former President George H.W. Bush.

The fawning reactions by the nation’s intertwined bipartisan political establishment and Mainstream Media were off-putting in any number of ways – only beginning with the transparently crude, self-serving attempts to contrast the alleged courtly golden age of selfless, noble American politics and policy he represented (and that they allegedly champion today) with the triumph of coarseness, hyper-partisanship and grifter-ism supposedly represented by Donald Trump’s election as President.

Not that Bush wasn’t an admirable personality in many ways, including his unmistakable record as a devoted, loving husband and father, and his courageous service in World War II. And not that he didn’t display some equally admirable traits as President – including a willingness to compromise, an ability to learn and evolve, a refusal to demonize political opponents, and that famous “prudence” lampooned by Saturday Night Live’s Dana Carvey.

But Bush’s presidency was marked by way too many major blind spots and outright failures to deserve canonization, and it’s no coincidence that the most serious entailed a refusal to recognize the obsolescence and flaws of the globalist priorities and strategies to which the nation’s chattering classes still cling.

It’s possible to single out significant individual Bush blunders, like his enthusiasm for offshoring-friendly trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the global agreement that created the World Trade Organization (WTO); his indifference to predatory foreign trade and broader economic practices that were undermining American industrial competitiveness; and his belief that greater U.S. and other foreign engagement with China would produce a People’s Republic that was more democratic, capitalist, and friendly to the West.

Way more important, however, is the broader globalist outlook he almost defiantly epitomized, and which was responsible for his biggest, closely related strategic and political mistakes.

On the strategic front, Bush does deserve credit for contributing to the overwhelmingly peaceful demise of the Soviet Union and the equally smooth unification of Germany – neither of was inevitable. But he squandered a critical opportunity to begin preparing Americans for the kind of fundamental transition away from intertwined Cold War approaches to both national security and economics that would have left the nation much safer and more prosperous than today.

Bush’s fans have a point when they insist that strong support of America’s Cold War alliance system was essential to ensure that the fall of communism didn’t trigger broader and potentially dangerous worldwide instability. Too much simultaneous upheaval could well have produced worrisome consequences in Europe in particular.

Yet Bush wasn’t content to view or portray the preservation of alliances and other Cold War institutions as temporary expedients needed to ensure a successful closure to that era. He repeatedly spoke of these arrangements and their survival as ends in and of themselves that were vital to defend and advance core American interests because those interests required nothing less than a thoroughly peaceful, stable, prosperous world. And in this respect, he embodied what I have described in The National Interest as the fatal mistake of American globalism, and one that, through endeavors that sought to achieve this utopian ambition, over the longer term has kept the nation exposed to utterly unnecessary risks, strapped it with equally unnecessary economic burdens, and left it less secure and economically healthy in the long run.

In other words, Bush repeatedly championed the globalist conviction that the best guarantors of America’s security and prosperity were not America’s own power, wealth, and potential, but those very international institutions whose effectiveness he prioritized. As a result, he dismissed the idea that genuine pragmatism recognized the superiority of a fundamentally different approach – ensuring the well-being of an already substantially secure and prosperous nation regardless of international conditions. And therefore, whenever expanding or consolidating the nation’s own material capabilities, or capitalizing on its geopolitical blessings, clashed with expensive and or risky efforts to bolster the institutions and inch toward globalism’s grandiose worldwide goals, he invariably chose the latter.

The political results were devastating, and if you accept the above analysis, they rightly limited Bush to a single term as president. For, as I wrote in The Atlantic back then, the objectives of U.S. foreign policy became increasingly remote from the most pressing concerns of the American people, and Bush never understood the gap. Indeed, he not only became known as a “foreign policy president.” He actually admitted he found dealing with overseas matters much more interesting than addressing issues on the home front – notably a short, shallow recession that struck the electorate as much more serious because the recovery remained “jobless” for so long. When his main 1992 rival for the White House, Bill Clinton, ribbed Bush’s indifference with the slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid,” the fate of “41” was all but sealed, and history served up what should have been a glaringly obvious lesson for the globalists.

That this political lesson has been both ignored and often emphatically rejected by America’s bipartisan globalist establishment is clear from its ostentatiously teary eulogies for Bush – and its contempt for a chief executive with at least a gut-level awareness of the popular appeal of the non-globalist approach he calls “America First.”

Moreover, in a stunning irony, the globalists keep ignoring how thoroughly their own approach has failed – and how quickly. How else to explain that, over the course of the three globalist post-41 presidents, Russia and China have reemerged as major security threats to the order they constantly deem an unprecedented and historic success? And don’t forget how globalism’s economic and political roots have been shredded by a worldwide financial crisis and painful recession stemming directly from its failures on the trade and investment front.

At the same time, precisely because this globalist establishment remains so powerful, and President Trump’s departure from its orthodoxy so partial, it’s premature to view George H.W. Bush’s passing as symbolizing the true end of a policy era. As the former president once said in another context, that would require more of a “vision thing” than the nation has been capable of producing for many decades.