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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do any of these strike you as safe enough bets?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Louder Talk and Still Too Small a Stick

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alliances, allies, Biden, China, Constitution, defense budget, Finland, Lippmann Gap, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, nuclear umbrella, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Sweden, Taiwan, Ted Galen Carpenter, treaties, Ukraine, Walter Lippmann

The foreign policy headlines have been coming so fast-and-furiously these days that they’re obscuring a dramatic worsening of a big, underlying danger: The dramatic expansion spearheaded lately by President Biden in America’s defense commitments that’s been unaccompanied so far by a comparable increase in the U.S. military budget. The result: A further widening of an already worrisome “Lippmann Gap” – a discrepancy between America’s foreign policy goals and the means available to achieve them that was prominently identified by the twentieth century journalist, philosopher, and frequent advisor to Presidents Walter Lippmann.

The existence of such a gap of any substantial size is troubling to begin with because it could wind up ensnaring the nation in conflicts that it’s not equipped to win – or even achieve stalemate. As I wrote as early as March, 2021, a Gap seemed built in to Mr. Biden’s approach to foreign policy from the beginning, since he made clear that America’s goals would be much more ambitious than under the avowedly America First-type presidency of Donald Trump, but also signaled that no big increase in America’s defense budget was in the offing.

Since then, Biden aides have expressed a willingness to boost defense budgets to ensure that they keep up with inflation – and therefore ensure that price increases don’t actually erode real capabilities. But no indications have emerged that funding levels will be sought that increase real capabilities much. Congressional Republicans say they support this kind of spending growth to handle new contingencies, but the numbers they’ve put forward so far seem significantly inadequate to the task.

That’s largely because most of them have strongly supported Biden decisions greatly to broaden U.S. the foreign military challenges that America has promised to meet. As for the President, he’s specifically:

>not only supported the bids of Finland and Sweden to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), but stated that the United States would “deter and confront any aggression while Finland and Sweden are in this accession process.” In other words, Mr. Biden both wants to (a) increase the number of countries that the United States is treaty-bound to defend to the point of exposing its territory to nuclear attack, and (b) extend that nuclear umbrella even before the two countries become legally eligible for such protection via Congress’ approval. It’ll be fascinating to see whether any lawmakers other than staunch non-interventionists like Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul question the Constitutionality of this position; and

>just this morning declared that he would use U.S. military force to defend Taiwan if it’s attacked by China even no defense treaty exists to cover this contingency, either, and even though, again, there’s been no Congressional approval of (or even debate on) this decision.

This Biden statement, moreover, lends credence to an argument just advanced by my good friend Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute – that although Ukraine has not yet joined NATO officially, ad therefore like Taiwan lacks an official security guarantee by the United States, it may have acquired de facto membership, and an equally informal promise of alliance military assistance whenever its security is threatened going forward.

As a result, Ted contends, “the Biden administration has erased the previous distinction between Alliance members and nonmembers” – and set a precedent that could help interventionist presidents intervene much more easily in a much greater number of foreign conflicts without Congressional authorization, let alone public support, than is presently the case.

To be sure, lots of legal and procedural issues have long muddied these waters. For example, the existence of a legally binding treaty commitment doesn’t automatically mean that U.S. leaders will or even must act on it. Even America’s leading security agreements (with the NATO members, Japan, and South Korea) stipulate that the signatories are simply required to meet attacks on each other in accordance with their (domestic) constitutional provisions for using their military forces.  (At the same time, breaking treaties like these, all else equal, isn’t exactly a formula for winning friends, influencing people, and foreign policy success generally. As a result, they shouldn’t be entered into lightly.)

Further complicating matters: America’s constitutional processes for war and peace decisions have long been something of a mess. The Constitution, after all, reserves to Congress the power to “declare war: and authorizes the legislature to “provide for the common Defense” and to “raise and support Armies.” Yet it also designates the President as the “Commander in Chief” of the armed forces.

There’s been a strong consensus since Founding Father James Madison made the argument that limiting the authority to declare war to Congress couldn’t and didn’t mean that the President couldn’t act to repel sudden attacks on the United States – that interpretation could be disastrous in a fast-moving world. But other than that, like most questions stemming from the document’s “separation of powers” approach to governing, the Constitution’s treatment of “war powers” is best (and IMO diplomatically) described as what the scholar Edward S. Corwin called a continuing “invitation to struggle.”

Undoubtedly, this struggle has resulted over time in a tremendous net increase in the Executive Branch’s real-world war powers. But the legal issues still exist and tend to wax in importance when presidential assertiveness leads to conflicts that turn unpopular.

I should specify that personally, I’m far from opposed yet to NATO membership for Finland and Sweden. Indeed, their militaries are so strong that their membership seems likely to strengthen the alliance on net, which would be a welcome change from NATO’s (and Washington’s) habit of welcoming countries whose main qualification seems to be their military vulnerability (like the Baltic states) and tolerating long-time members that have been inexcusable deadbeats (like Germany).

Similarly, as I’ve written, because American policymakers recklessly allowed the country’s semiconductor manufacturers to fall behind a Taiwanese company technologically, I now believe that Taiwan needs to be seen as a vital U.S. national security interest and deserves a full U.S. defense guarantee.

Yet I remain worried that the Biden administration’s Ukraine policy risks plunging the United States into a conflict with Russia that could escalate to the nuclear level on behalf of a country that (rightly) was never seen as a vital U.S. interest during the Cold War.

So my main concern today doesn’t concern the specifics of these latest Biden security commitment decisions. Instead, it concerns the overall pattern that’s emerging of talking loudly and carrying too small a stick – and ignoring the resulting Lippmann Gap widening. However Americans and their leaders come out on handling these individual crises, they need to agree that the responses  urgently need to close the Gap overall. Otherwise, it’s hard to imagine satisfactorily dealing with any of them on their own.

Following Up: A Lippmann Gap Still Could be a Big Threat to Biden’s Foreign Policy

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allies, America First, Biden, China, defense budget, Donald Trump, Following Up, Lippmann Gap, Russia, Theodore Roosevelt

Late last month, I worried here that President Biden could open up a dangerous “Lippmann Gap” in U.S. foreign and national security policy by proposing a defense budget incapable of supporting his expansive ambitions. Yesterday, the administration came out with its first official budget request, and although it lacks the detail to justify firm conclusions, I’m still worried.

The nub of the problem is this: The President has repeatedly announced his intention to reverse course from his predecessor’s America First strategy and return U.S. foreign policy to its decades-long pre-Trump sweeping global activism and engagement. And since Mr. Biden’s “America is back” declarations clearly entail at the least a determination to fill an allegedly vital gap left by Donald Trump, and probably to pursue an even more expansive agenda, logic and common sense alone dictate that he request much more defense spending than at present.

It’s true that Pentagon budget and the military forces it supports are by no means the only tools available to the nation to carry out its international aims. It’s also true that defense spending can be made more effective without boosting overall spending levels by spending existing funds more efficiently and wisely. The latter’s potential won’t start to be revealed until the more detailed budget request is made later this year.

But for now, what is known is that Mr. Biden will ask for some 1.6 percent more for the Defense Department proper for the coming budget year (fiscal 2022) than the resources allotted to the Pentagon during the Trump administration’s final year (fiscal 2021). When adding in national security funds not provided to the Department itself (mainly for maintaining the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile – which is handled by the Energy Department), the Biden increase is also about two percent over the funding appropriated during the final Trump year.  (This figure is calculated from here and here.)

Knowledgeable observers of defense spending may note that these Biden fiscal 2022 requests are considerably bigger than the Trump fiscal 2021 requests. These sought just 0.1 percent more for the Pentagon itself than was spent in 2020, and 0.34 percent more for that larger national security budget including the non-Pentagon money. (These figures are found here and calculated from here and here.) 

But Mr. Biden charged that the Trump national security agenda was sorely inadequate. So it’s natural that he’d want more military spending than his predecessor. What’s noteworthy, however, is that the Biden request isn’t that much more. In fact, if inflation takes its expected course this year, this latest military spending proposal will leave the Defense Department and the other agencies responsible for national security with less money when adjusting for rising prices than they spent last year.

Moreover, even in terms of “top-line” spending figures, this Biden request is hardly the last word. The Democratic Congress is practically certain to make further cuts.

Again, wiser spending could fill some of this gap. But what the Biden administration has said about its priorities isn’t all that encouraging, either. Just one example (but a big one): The administration stated yesterday that its military spending request “prioritizes the need to counter the threat from China as the [Defense] Department’s top challenge. The Department would also seek to deter destabilizing behavior by Russia.”

It’s still possible, as suggested above, that moving funds into U.S. China- and Russia-related accounts from lower priority accounts could accomplish these aims even though overall outlays decline in real terms. But in the very next sentence, we learn that the administration isn’t confident that these moves would be the answer (assuming they’re even being contemplated). For it claims that

“Leveraging the Pacific Deterrence Initiative and working together with allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific region and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, DOD [the Defense Department] would ensure that the United States builds the concepts, capabilities, and posture necessary to meet these challenges.”

That is, help from allied countries supposedly will be crucial to countering the Chinese and Russian threats. But not only have these countries skimped on their own defense for decades. For the time being, the President has decided not to press them overly hard to share more of the defense burden (as documented in my original “Lippmann Gap” post).

To repeat: I’m not calling for more U.S. military spending. In fact, I’d like to see Pentagon budgets shrink. But this position reflects my judgment that the nation can be adequately safe and sound by doing less in the international sphere. As long as President Biden wants to do more – not only than me, but also than Donald Trump – the only responsible policy would be to boost military spending. Anything else amounts to inverting former President Theodore Roosevelt’s approach of speaking softly and carrying a big stick – which history teaches never, ever ends well.

Making News: Foreign Policy Overreach Post Re-Published by The National Interest

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Biden, defense budget, foreign policy, globalism, Lippmann Gap, Making News, national security, strategy, The National Interest

I’m pleased to announce that last Friday’s post about a major potential flaw in President Biden’s globalist foreign policy plans – and threat to U.S. national security – was re-published yesterday (with permission!) by The National Interest. I’d have put up this notice yesterday, but its appearance this soon caught me off guard.

All the same, click here in case you missed it, or if you’d like to see it in slightly modified form. I’d also be curious to know whether readers prefer the less personal and conversational style in this new version, or the original.

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

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Return of the Lippmann Gap?

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alliances, allies, Biden, burden sharing, China, defense budget, Democrats, Donald Trump, Europe, globalism, Japan, Lippmann Gap, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, progressives, Russia, soft power, South Korea, Walter Lippmann

No, it’s not the title of a newly discovered Philip Roth novel. Instead, the ”Lippmann Gap” is a phrase coined by scholars to describe the result of a country’s aims in foreign policy exceeding the means available to pursue them.

It was named after the twentieth century journalist, philosopher, and frequent adviser to leading politicians Walter Lippmann, who called attention to its frequency and dangers in his classic 1943 book, U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic. (P.S. In this post, I described a major flaw in Lippmann’s thinking, but he was right about the importance of establishing a sustainable relationship between a country’s ambitions and its ability to realize them.)

Troublingly for Americans, and for other countries that have long relied on the United States for protection, evidence has emerged that the gap could soon return in a big way under the Biden administration – whose principals, including the President, are typically described as diplomatic “adults in the room” making the welcome return to power after the dangerous tumult of the Trump years.

The evidence consists of reporting (see here and here) that the administration later this spring will submit a defense budget request that seeks no new funding over last year’s levels. Of course, this reporting may turn out to be inaccurate. Or the Biden-ites could still change their plans even if it is currently accurate. In addition, negotiations with Congress, which needs to approve these plans, could result in some increases.

Moreover, a flat defense budget request is by no means necessarily bad news for anyone, except for whichever defense contractors lose expected sales to the Pentagon. For example, the Defense Department has long been notorious for wasteful spending. And adopting different priorities, or more efficient weapons and other equipment, could well provide America and at least most of its allies with just as much “bang for the buck” as previously, as changing circumstances produce a shift in deployments from missions judged to have lost some of their importance to missions seen to have become more significant. In fact, I’ve long favored major cuts precisely because the nation spends way too much seeking objectives – like shoring up the defense of Western Europe – which haven’t been necessary in decades, and indeed in theory create greater dangers than they can address.

But there’s no reason to think that such considerations would be driving forces behind a reported Biden defense spending freeze, or near-freeze. And this is where the Lippmann Gap comes in. Because there’s every reason to believe that Mr. Biden intends to expand America’s foreign defense commitments on net, and because in at least one major reason of concern, the main potential enemy (China) keeps strengthening its militaty and has been acting more aggressively in recent years, and because a major object of China’s expansionist aims, Taiwan, has become the manufacturer of the world’s most advanced semiconductors – the computer chips that serve as the brains of an explosively growing number of civilian and defense-related products.

What other conclusions can one draw from the President’s repeated globalist assertions that “America is back,” and that in particular, it means to reassure allies around the world that allegedly become unnerved about U.S. reliability after four years of being (rightly, in my view) harangued by Trump attacks on their own skimpy defense spending, and threats to leave them in the lurch unless their alleged free-riding ends? (P.S. – not only weren’t these threats carried out, but as I noted in this article, in some noteworthy ways, the former President actually bolstered America’s alliance-related foreign military deployments.  Mr. Biden, meanwhile, has decided, at least for now, to let Europe’s members of NATO – the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance – Japan, and South Korea all off the burden-sharing hook, as made clear here, here, and here.)

Indeed, a flat or even reduced Biden defense budget request might come about in part from pressure from Democratic progressives to cut spending significantly. Fifty House members of his party have just urged him to reduce the defense budget “significantly.” And their rationale has nothing to do with the aforementioned potentially sensible reasons for cuts. Their case for a smaller U.S. military emphasizes that

“Hundreds of billions of dollars now directed to the military would have greater return if invested in diplomacy, humanitarian aid, global public health, sustainability initiatives, and basic research. We must end the forever wars, heal our veterans, and re-orient towards a holistic conception of national security that centers public health, climate change and human rights.”

I’m all for many of these particular aims, and also strongly support developing new definitions of national security and how to achieve and maintain it. But the Biden administration seems likeliest not to redefine national security significantly, but at most add these new domestic-oriented objectives on to the existing list of traditional goals. Therefore, if the progressives get even some of what they want, the effect inevitably would be to assume that “diplomacy, humanitarian aid, global public health, sustainability initiatives, and basic research” can substitute adequately for military force in carrying out an American foreign policy agenda that’s growing, not contracting.

Whether or not I believe this (I don’t), or you the individual reader believes, this is beside the point. U.S. adversaries seem unlikely to be impressed with these forms of what political scientists call “soft power.” Hence China keeps boosting its own military budget, and Russia responded to Obama administration Europe troops cuts by invading Crimea and attacking Ukraine.

U.S. allies are reacting skeptically, too. For example, European leaders evidently worry that Trump’s election revealed a strong popular U.S. desire to shed many global defense burdens that the Biden victory hasn’t eliminated. Therefore, there’s been increasing talk, anyway, in their ranks about reducing reliance on U.S. hard power by building up their own. And as I’ve repeatedly written, that would be great for Americans. But it’s sure not part of any Biden plans that have been made public.

A defense budget request fully reflecting the President’s bold “America is back” vow wouldn’t make me especially happy. But it would be far better than one that reopens or widens (depending on your views of current U.S. capabilities) a Lippmann Gap – and indicates to both domestic and global audiences that he really means to carry out globalism on the cheap.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Why Establishment Thinking About Containing China Remains Far from Serious

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allies, American Enterprise Institute, Asia, burden sharing, China, Daniel Blumenthal, defense budget, East Asia, entitlements, foreign policy establishment, free-riding, Japan, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, RealClearPolitics.com, South Korea, taxes, tech transfer, Trade

Congratulations to the American Enterprise Institute’s Daniel Blumenthal for coming up with some genuinely new insights into the U.S.-China balance of power and especially its relationship with the evolving economies of the two countries. Unfortunately, Blumenthal’s new essay for RealClearPolitics.com also shows that gaping blind spots remain in establishment thinking about the China challenge its members claim to be analyzing seriously.

For the purposes of this post, let’s grant Blumenthal’s mainstream assumption that it matters greatly to the United States which great power dominates East Asia politically. I disagree, but the point here is that if America does want to fend off a China challenge, greater policy changes will be needed than Blumenthal and other conventional wisdom-mongers seem ready to contemplate.

The author’s main theme is that the United States has no legitimate reason to doubt its economic capacity to prevent China from becoming Asia’s kingpin, and his new wrinkle involves measuring economic power by looking more at national wealth, and less at national economic growth. Since the U.S. wealth levels are both much greater than China’s, and since the gap has just resumed growing according to statistics he cites, America can easily afford the military forces needed to put China back in its place. And he blames China’s recent and impressive catch-up on this score on Americans’ recent (Blumenthal doesn’t specify the time frame) political decision to skimp on military spending while continue to devote exorbitant sums to entitlement spending – which has indeed long dominated the budget outlays (along with, as he’s noted, interest payments on the resulting ballooning national debt).

According to Blumenthal, Americans and their leaders as a result have chosen to elevate “the intergenerational transfer of wealth” over national security. Strictly speaking, he’s right. But other interpretations of national priorities seem just as legitimate.

For example, as the author briefly notes, the U.S. population is aging. So a major national retirement funding challenge will face even the most defense-minded politicians. That doesn’t let American leaders or the recipients of these entitlements off the hook in terms of making sacrifices needed to safeguard national security. But it’s bound to raise the question of whether the burden of sacrifice should be limited to middle class Americans. The great increase in national wealth mentioned by Blumenthal makes clear that the nation has many other resources on which it can draw to fund a bigger military – especially since the private economy’s wealth has led the surge. In other words, why not tax the rich or corporations more heavily to pay for new personnel and weapons?

One obvious rejoinder is that modest levels of taxes on wealthy Americans and on American companies are needed to ensure the economic growth needed to keep national wealth levels robust. But even accepting the doctrinaire trickle-down economics underlying this assumption, should upper-level individual incomes and business profits be completely exempted from any responsibility to pay for the military? If so, why? And wouldn’t that policy greatly loosen the relationship between national wealth and military capability emphasized by Blumenthal?

The author also neglects another big pool of resources that can be brought to bear on countering China: the wealth of America’s regional allies. Stunningly, after decades of American pleading for greater burden-sharing, countries with a far greater stake than the United States in resisting Chinese regional domination continue free-riding on U.S. defense guarantees. Why should American entitlements recipients see any reduction in benefits before Japanese and South Koreans pay at least as much for their own security (relatively speaking) as the much more geographically distant United States does? And their contributions could be immense. Japan alone, for example, is the world’s third largest national economy (behind the United States and China, respectively). 

Finally, as with nearly all the rest of the establishment, Blumenthal completely neglects the opposite side of the U.S.-China defense resources equation: The decisive extent to which American economic policy continues enriching China, and therefore continuing to enable it to afford lots of both “guns and butter” (as economists and political scientists have dubbed military and social spending). Thanks in part to literally trillions of dollars of earnings from the trade surpluses it’s long run with the United States, the Chinese pie keeps expanding strongly (that’s the economic growth whose importance Blumenthal softpedals). As a result, more new resources are generated for whatever priorities or combination of priorities the Chinese government chooses.

Even worse, as I’ve long noted, recklessly lax tech transfer policies on America’s part have for decades given the Chinese much of the knowhow needed to turn out increasingly advanced weapons and other military systems. Some signs of official concerns about this outflow have appeared in Washington lately, but U.S. leaders (and the rest of the establishment) remain woefully behind the curve.

When America’s East Asia security strategy stops bolstering the Chinese threat it depicts as such a huge concern, when it insists that local countries act like they have at least as great a stake in remaining independent of China as does the United States, when the wealthiest Americans are required to devote more of their recent immense windfalls to the common defense, and if all of those changes still leave China closing fast on the combined forces of the United States and its neighbors, it would become legitimate to ask Main Street Americans to start shouldering greater burdens. Until then, the U.S. working and middle classes will be entirely justified in demanding that the nation’s Asia strategy pass a minimal seriousness test first.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: A Good Trump Defense Speech – but Good Enough?

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2016 election, defense, defense budget, deterrence, Donald Trump, foreign policy establishment, Madeleine Albright, Mainstream Media, military, nation-building, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, The New York Times, Wilsonianism

Donald Trump has done it again! No, I’m not talking about the Republican presidential candidate blurting out a new insult or gaffe. I’m talking about yet another speech or set of remarks that has given the nation yet another opportunity to learn an important lesson about the essentials of a sound foreign policy.

Unfortunately, as in some previous instances, Trump didn’t capitalize adequately on this opportunity, and thereby sowed the seeds of confusion – especially in the ranks of a Mainstream Media too thoroughly imbued with and enthusiastic about establishment conventional wisdom to cover this subject objectively, let alone intelligently.

Trump’s latest chance to teach some badly needed diplomatic common sense came yesterday in his speech in Philadelphia on military readiness. Its two main points entailed a promise to increase American military spending greatly, and an attack on Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent, as an out-of-control, indeed “trigger happy,” global interventionist.

Almost instinctively, the establishment media, along with numerous national security types I follow on Twitter, claimed to have caught Trump in a major contradiction. As two New York Times correspondents put it, the maverick tycoon repeated his “at times paradoxical approach of using fiery oratory to promise a military buildup and the immediate destruction of the Islamic State, while also rejecting the nation-building and interventionist instincts of George W. Bush’s administration.”

In other words, Trump is by and large proposing spending huge – and possibly unaffordable – sums to pay for a military that he doesn’t intend to use much. The clear implication: Could anything be more stupid and wasteful?

In a narrow sense, Times reporters Ashley Parker and Matthew Rosenberg committed the common but nonetheless inexcusable mistake of assuming that someone who opposes military or other forms of intervention anywhere must logically oppose them everywhere. And vice versa. It’s as if every area of the world or every situation faced by the United States presents threats or opportunities of exactly the same magnitude.

In a more fundamental sense, however, the Times‘ critique harkens back to a question posed by Clinton-era Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, when she challenged the first Bush administration’s broadly circumspect approach to using force abroad: “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” And this view is just as ditzy as the above all-or-nothing position.

To anyone even minimally schooled in national security strategy, it should have been embarrassingly and immediately clear that Albright hadn’t heard of the concept of deterrence. It’s been the overriding reason that countries, including the United States, have developed and maintained nuclear forces after America dropped atomic bombs in Japan in World War II.

But deterrence alone is also entirely valid justification for building and maintaining a strong conventional military. And it’s in no way intrinsically incompatible with the kind of relatively non-interventionist foreign policy instincts Trump has revealed. Indeed, as I have written, no approach to world affairs could make more sense for a country as fundamentally secure and economically self-reliant as the United States.

It’s entirely possible that Trump is wrong in his specific assessments of America’s most important international interests and how best to defend and promote them. But his suggestion that military strength has major value in and of itself, and that this value has no intrinsic bearing on how active or passive the nation should be in the international arena, is beyond informed criticism.

Trump did use in this speech the phrase “Peace through strength,” which in other circumstances would make the point nicely. Ditto for the follow-on claim that “President Obama and Hillary Clinton have also overseen deep cuts in our military, which only invite more aggression from our adversaries.” Similarly, he resolved “to deter, avoid and prevent conflict through our unquestioned military strength.”

But to an electorate and a foreign policy establishment and a national press corps accustomed to equating strength with interventionism, it wasn’t close to satisfactory. And Trump himself compounded the confusion by repeatedly referring to tactics and goals suggesting that he buys this idea, too. Hence his references to achieving “a stable, peaceful world with less conflict and more common ground”; to “promoting regional stability, and producing an easing of tensions in the world”; to “[making] new friends, [rebuilding] old alliances, and [bringing] new allies into the fold”; to promoting “gradual reform” in the terminally dysfunctional Middle East”; to “promoting our system and our government and our way of life as the best in the world…”

None of these goals is objectionable in and of itself. In the abstract, they’re of course admirable. But without the kinds of “When?”, “Where?”, and “How much?” questions he never asked, these objectives degenerate into the kind of grandiose, and even reckless, Wilsonianism that Trump’s previous attacks on “nation-building” have indicated he opposes.

Nor is it comforting to assume that Trump and his advisers stuck these stock phrases into the speech to assure voters that he’s solidly traditional in key respects, or to reach out to those conservatives more enamored with American global assertiveness. For such rhetoric always threatens to raise expectations and set the kinds of interventionist traps into which even the most cautious presidents have fallen. (Unless you think Lyndon Johnson relished the prospect of sending 500,000 American soldiers into Vietnam?)

Trump still has several weeks to flesh out his foreign policy approach more coherently and more sensibly. He could also wind up waiting to start staging teachable moments until he’s installed in the White House. But given the pace and unpredictability of world events, he shouldn’t assume that time is an ally in this respect.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Trump’s Making Sense About NATO & Europe, Too

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2016 election, allies, Brussels attacks, Cold War, defense budget, Donald Trump, Earl C. Ravenal, Europe, intelligence, ISIS, Middle East, military spending, NATO, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, terrorism

Front-running Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has done it again: He’s scandalized the American political and foreign policy (and therefore media) establishments with his charge this week that the United States is spending too much on defending Europe via its membership in the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) alliance. And once again, he’s hit the nail much closer to the head than the nation’s political leaders and self-appointed national security experts.

Most of the responses to Trump make one or both of two main points: First, that the NATO commitment isn’t very expensive at all; and second, the aftermath of yet another major terrorist attack in Europe is the last time when anyone should be questioning this most important of U.S. ties to the Continent – including for America’s own sake.

Yet the first allegation is nonsense. In large measure it’s based on the costs of maintaining NATO as an organization. This sum is indeed miniscule compared with the overall U.S. military budget or the size of the whole American economy. But it also has virtually nothing to do with the real costs of fielding and deploying the military forces – both nuclear and conventional – that do the actual defending even in peacetime.

Surprisingly, this figure isn’t easy to identify. Why not? Because the Defense Department doesn’t break out most of  its budget by expenditures for major regions of the world. The one major exception: its funding requests for what it calls Overseas Contingency Operations – money used to pay for ongoing missions like Middle East wars (including attacks on ISIS), counter-terrorism campaigns, and the like.

Significantly, one Europe-related category is now listed. It’s called the European Reassurance Initiative, and as the Pentagon openly states, its components – notably increasing the American military presence in Europe – are mainly directed at newly assertive Russia. Last year, this program alone cost more than the U.S. contribution to the NATO budget – $789 million versus $514 million. And the Defense Department wants to quadruple the amount for next year.

At the same time, these totals don’t begin to take into account the full costs of the American military commitment to Europe. A rough idea of how great they could be can be gleaned from one of the few systematic efforts to analyze the geography of the defense budget – by the brilliant and iconoclastic former Pentagon official Earl C. Ravenal. Ravenal’s work unfortunately dates from the Cold War era, but it does provide a sense of the yawning gap between those NATO organization budget figures and truly comprehensive numbers.

According to Ravenal, the NATO commitment accounted fully half ($129 billion) of the 1983 $258 billion proposed Pentagon budget. Critics responded that even without NATO/Europe responsibilities, the nation would still need to maintain many of the forces both stationed on the Continent and assigned to it under various contingencies. But they never explained why. So Ravenal’s statistics look pretty reasonable to me.

The current (fiscal year 2016) Pentagon budget request is $585.2 billion; therefore, using the Ravenal methodology, we’d get just over $300 billion devoted to Europe’s defense. But this figure would also be highly misleading. After all, U.S. priorities have changed dramatically. During the Cold War days, the United States regularly maintained more than 300,000 troops in Europe, along with their families. Today, European deployments are down to about 50,000. Moreover, the United States keeps many fewer nuclear weapons in Europe as well (although these arms have always been relatively cheap.) Today, the region commanding the greatest American military resources is the Middle East. (And to add to the complications, many of the forces and other assets in Europe support Middle East deployments and combat, too).

Nonetheless, even taking these historical changes into account, it must be clear that the American commitment to Europe is costing at least tens of billions of dollars annually, and possibly more. Given these totals, given their likely increase, and given the risks (including nuclear) still run by the United States to help defend the Europeans, it sounds perfectly reasonable to ask whether Americans are getting adequate bang for this national security buck – especially considering how wealthy Europe is today, and how meager its own military spending.

But doesn’t the United States need European cooperation to help fight ISIS and other terrorist threats? Unquestionably, the more assistance the United States can get, the safer it will be. And since Europe seems to be such an important target for ISIS in particular, the ability to access European intelligence about the Islamic States would appear to be invaluable.

Three questions, however, need to be answered by the Establishmentarians. First, why would that intelligence access need to depend on keeping today’s NATO ties fully intact? Why couldn’t Washington and the Europeans be able to keep working together on the terrorism front without Americans underwriting Europe’s nuclear and conventional defense against other threats? Would the allies, for example, withhold this information if the United States drew down its military presence further? Fits of pique of course can never be ruled out. But wouldn’t the Europeans then risk losing their access to U.S. intelligence and other forms of assistance?

Second, just how good is European intelligence? According to this new examination of Belgium’s anti-terrorism efforts, little confidence is justified. In fact, overall European counter-terrorism activity is unimpressive at best. On the one hand, these countries will surely get up to speed in the wake of recent attacks. On the other hand, it’s nothing less than amazing that they’ve dawdled so long considering how much closer they are located to the Middle East than America is. So maybe once the initial outrage at the Brussels attacks fades, Europe will go back to business as usual, with all that implies about how helpful to the United States its countries can actually be.

Third, will the Europeans ever get their military act together?  Of course, these countries are potentially valuable as military allies in the air and ground fighting against ISIS in the Middle East. But there can be no question that the performance has lagged badly. And even though some signs of increased European military spending are finally appearing, they won’t turn into significantly greater capabilities for many years.

Some believe that Trump’s remarks simply represent an attempted bluff, and that his real aim is to convince the allies to bolster their capabilities. If so, the dynamics of free-riding are likely to doom this ploy as they have so often in the past. But if Trump is signaling a belief that U.S.-European security relations need major changes, and that a rigorous, unsentimental look at costs and benefits, risks and rewards could well justify much less U.S. involvement in the Continent’s defense, the result might easily be a much safer America, and a mainstay of foreign policy conventional wisdom that he’s made look just as foolish as the political conventional wisdom.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Desperately Seeking Real Retrenchment

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Afghanistan, American exceptionalism, Asia-Pacific, Baltic states, Bashir Al-Assad, boots on the ground, Charles Lanes, chemical weapons, defense budget, defense spending, Earl Ravenal, George W. Bush, international law, Iraq, ISIS, isolationism, Middle East, multilateralism, national interests, NATO, Nixon Doctrine, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, pivot, Poland, Richard Nixon, Russia, sequestration, Soviet Union, Stephen Sestanovich, Syria, Ukraine, Vietnam War, vital interests, Vladimir Putin, Washington Post

Washington Post columnist Charles Lane has just done an excellent job of demonstrating how powerfully universalist America’s bipartisan foreign policy establishment remains – even as powerful reasons keep multiplying for climbing down from this wildly ambitious approach.

According to Lane, a new book by former American diplomat and Columbia University political scientist Stephen Sestanovich bears out President Obama’s claim to be a kindred spirit with Richard M. Nixon as a “retrenchment” president – one of the chief executives who has sought to “correct the perceived overreaching of their predecessors and free up U.S. resources for domestic concerns.” In fact, says Lane, Sestanovich has written that post-World War II U.S. foreign policy has been marked by a “constant pendulum-swing between administrations that aggressively pursued U.S. goals abroad” (who the author calls “maximalists”) and those Nixon- and Obama-style retrenchers.

I hate to comment on books I haven’t yet read. But Lane’s description of Mr. Nixon and Mr. Obama both qualify as retrenchers reveals a mindset so enthusiastic about massive and potentially open-ended U.S. involvement in literally every corner of the world if necessary that it sees even talk about a more discriminating approach as a major departure.

Judging by the record, it hasn’t been. In fact, both the Nixon talk and the Obama talk about retrenchment have been overwhelmingly that – talk. Just as important, and closely related, what have arguably looked at least superficially like exercises in retrenchment have in fact been exercises in wishful thinking. Both presidents have actually agreed that the security, stability, and even prosperity of the entire world are U.S. vital interests. They’ve simply differed with the maximalists in insisting that these interests can be defended through means that are less dangerous and violent, and more globally popular, than the unilateral U.S. use of military force.

To cite the leading historical example, the ballyhooed Nixon Doctrine of 1970 was never a decision to cross Vietnam or any part of Asia off the list of vital U.S. interests – those whose defense was thought essential for maintaining America’s own security and prosperity. As explained initially by Earl C. Ravenal shortly after the Doctrine’s declaration, Mr. Nixon had decided, in the absence of any evidence, that this vital set of objectives could be defended without an early resort to U.S. military involvement – chiefly, by the militaries of America’s regional allies.

Therefore, Ravenal wrote:

“the Administration’s new policies and decision processes do not bring about the proposed balance [between the country’s foreign policy ends and the means to be used to attain them]; in fact, they create a more serious imbalance. Essentially we are to support the same level of potential involvement with smaller conventional forces. The specter of intervention will remain, but the risk of defeat or stalemate will be greater; or the nuclear threshold will be lower.”

President Obama has given us a different version of such dangerous wishful thinking. More accurately, he’s given us several different versions. His original 2008 candidacy for the White House was largely motivated by a conviction that the overly unilateralist and militaristic tendencies of George W. Bush had produced disaster in Iraq, and were actually undermining U.S. security by damaging America’s international image.

That’s why Mr. Obama focused so much attention on repairing that image. He never indicated that he would scale back that list of U.S. vital interests. He simply suggested that they could be better defended if need be by acting multilaterally, with international approval, rather than by going it alone. And he conveyed the clear impression that challenges could be prevented in the first place if only America became more popular in regions like the Middle East.

Once in office, Mr. Obama did try to establish a hierarchy of U.S. worldwide interests that would have operational impact. He decided that the nation had been so preoccupied with Middle East wars that it had been neglected the Asia-Pacific region, which he considered at least as important. So he launched a “pivot” that would transfer some American forces from the former to the latter.

But the president never apparently judged the Middle East to be less important to America’s fate. He simply concluded that, with the Afghanistan and Iraq wars supposedly winding down, it had become less dangerous. Having been proven wrong by the rise of ISIS. in Afghanistan, he’s (gradually) boosting the American military presence in region again. The president is claiming, moreover – based on as little evidence as Mr. Nixon required – that any remaining capabilities gap can be filled by the armed forces of regional countries. Worse, many of his Republican critics, who are just as reluctant to deploy many more U.S. “boots on the ground,” agree with Mr. Obama’s fundamental assessment.

Further, the president has actually expanded the list of circumstances in the Middle East (and presumably elsewhere) that should justify American military responses – the kinds of chemical weapons attacks launched by Bashir Al-Assad against Syrians revolting against his dictatorship, along with similar major violations of international law.  (This effort, so far, has not yet won over the public.)

Nor does that exhaust Mr. Obama’s efforts to lengthen the list of U.S. vital interests. He has understandably responded to Russia’s recent provocations against allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) by strengthening U.S. forces and deploying them more conspicuously in new NATO members like Poland and the Baltic states, former Soviet satellites clearly in Moscow’s line of fire. Less understandable have been the Obama administration’s numerous suggestions that the security of Ukraine, too, is a matter of urgent American concern – even though this country was actually part of the old Soviet Union for decades with no apparent effects on U.S. safety or well-being.

Yet like the debate over countering ISIS, that over dealing with Vladimir Putin spotlights one major difference between President Obama and his (mainly) Republican foreign policy critics: Many of them have strongly backed big boosts in the U.S. military budget (if not always using these forces), including aggressive moves to circumvent spending caps established by the sequestration process. Mr. Obama has not sought comparable increases.

The president unquestionably has often spoken in terms that seem to support a smaller U.S. role in the world – e.g., his remarks suggesting that America’s exceptionalism isn’t all that exceptional, and reminding that much of the world has legitimate historical grievances against the West, and in some cases against the United States specifically. But his strategic walk has never matched this talk, and the continuing flood of contentions to the contrary in the punditocracy and even academe (if Lane’s Post column is accurate) plainly are serving their (partly) intended purpose of preventing searching debate on foreign policy fundamentals.

Given the nation’s resulting over-extension militarily, therefore, when the chattering class powers-that-be start labeling presidents or most other politicians as retrenchers or minimalists (an improvement to be sure over the hackneyed charge of “isolatonism”), the only legitimate reaction is a thoroughly exasperated, “If only.”

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Where a Neocon Gets it Right – and Why Progressives Should Listen

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Congress, conservatives, defense budget, foreign policy, internationalism, libertarians, national security, neconservatives, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, progressives, Republicans, Robert Kagan, sequester

I’ve never had much use for foreign policy analyst Robert Kagan, though I have admired his talent for framing run-of-the-mill neoconservative foreign policy views in ways that others, especially liberals, for some reason feel compelled to take seriously. But a new column by the Brookings Institution fellow and Washington Post columnist provides a great opportunity both to praise him for injecting some needed intellectual honesty in the nation’s defense and foreign debate, and to clarify some of my own views on the subject.

Kagan, like his fellow neconservatives, has long urged the United States to seek and maintain an unabashed global leadership role. They believe that nothing less than countering aggression everywhere and actively seeking to expand the ranks of pro-Western countries is needed to achieve adequate levels of American security.

Encouragingly, moreover, for the neocons, most Republicans and other conservatives seem to agree – thanks no doubt to Vladimir Putin’s moves to enlarge Russia’s influence in its backyard, to stunning terrorist advances in the Middle East, and to Iran’s growing influence in the region and nuclear ambitions.

Yet Kagan has rightly upbraided this critical mass of the American Right – especially in Congress – for not putting its wallet where its mouth is. His March 19 column observes that, for all their hawkish talk lately – including sharp criticisms of President Obama – most Republican Senators and Congressmen still favor the so-called sequester that leaves U.S. defense spending woefully short of the resources that their apparent agenda requires. As a result, Kagan writes:

“one is left to wonder whether the new tone is based on genuine conviction about the nature of the threats facing the world and America’s essential role in meeting them, or whether many Republican politicians just figure that hawkishness is a great way to run against the Democratic nominee in 2016.”

At least as important, he warns that pushing the nation into a tougher foreign policy posture without adequate funding would leave America in the worst of all possible positions, courting greater risks and dangers without the ability to handle them.

Where Kagan errs – profoundly, in my opinion – is in continuing to insist that Americans have no choice but to play this hyper-active global role, and that Republicans, conservatives, and other U.S. leaders must rally their somnolent countrymen to the cause with Churchillian displays of leadership.

As I see it, Kagan makes the same fundamental mistake made for decades by the internationalists of both the Left and Right who have completely dominated U.S. foreign policymaking.  He completely misses the geopolitical and related economic advantages that make greatly reducing global engagement (along with measures to strengthen homeland defenses and maximize economic self-sufficiency) the only sensible course for the nation’s diplomacy. But I completely agree with his calls for higher defense spending for this crucial reason: As implied above, they are absolutely essential for giving not only “hawkish” conservative foreign policy strategies any chance of success, but for giving President Obama’s strategy and others on the Left any chance of success.

For just as the Right has propagated the dangerous myth that American foreign policies would be more successful and the world made a much safer place if only the president would show some actual and rhetorical muscle, Mr. Obama and the rest of the Left have propagated an equally dangerous myth: that America (and the world) would realize the same (vital) benefits simply by shifting more existing resources from the military to foreign aid, human rights promotion, environmental protection, international institutions, and other programs and actors that can achieve the same aims in benign rather than bellicose ways.  (Libertarian conservatives of course have peddled their own variation of these claims.)

And these progressives pay no attention to homeland security and economic independence, either. In fact, their enthusiasm for Open Borders-style immigration policies can only weaken the former.

It’s true that, as Kagan notes, Mr. Obama supports military spending levels higher than those provided for in the Republican-backed sequester. But it’s also true that, as Kagan also notes, such spending levels cannot possibly advance and protect the interests the United States continues to declare.

Which brings us to my own views on the president’s record overseas. I have indeed strongly criticized Mr. Obama’s policies in the Middle East, toward Russia, and in East Asia (where he believes a combination of new military deployments and new trade deals can contain Chinese influence) for reasons that have struck many as at least neconservative-friendly. But I’ve tried to specify that I’m not endorsing anything like neoconservative goals. I’m simply trying to point out that the president’s blueprints and actions can’t possibly achieve its own objectives, and are all too likely to leave the nation needlessly exposed to danger.

Kagan’s critique of mainstream conservatives and Republicans is similar, and he deserves credit for making it. Now we need folks on the Left (and on the libertarian Right) to point out their own fellows’ delusions. And above all, politicians across the board need to pay attention. Until they do, America will be saddled with a leadership class divided not by rival viable foreign policy blueprints, but by rival foreign policy fairy tales. If you’re wondering why the world looks like a more dangerous place, that’s where the answer starts.