Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Why Kissinger Comes Up Short on North Korea

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alliances, China, East Asia-Pacific, foreign policy establishment, Henry Kissinger, Japan, missiles, North Korea, nuclear war, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, realism, South Korea, The Wall Street Journal

Henry Kissinger’s plan – or at least outline of a plan – to resolve the North Korea crisis is out. And even though the 94 (94!)-year old former Secretary of State and presidential national security adviser has not held public office in decades, you should pay attention because you can bet American leaders in the Executive Branch and Congress are. So are foreign governments (many of which, including China, Kissinger has made millions – at least – “consulting”for).

Kissinger’s approach, laid out in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last Friday, is definitely a cut above the usual (often dangerously misleading) drivel that most commentators have been issuing since North Korea recently demonstrated dramatic and unexpected progress toward being able to hit the U.S. homeland with a nuclear-armed missile. But since Kissinger is a creature of the foreign policy establishment that keeps clinging to an obsolete Korea strategy that is now needlessly exposing the United States to nuclear attack, his proposals ultimately fail to promote and defend America’s interests first, or even to acknowledge the deep splits that must no longer be papered over between U.S. needs and South Korean needs.

The strongest argument Kissinger makes, as I see it, is the suggestion that there’s only one way of persuading China to exert enough pressure on North Korea to achieve Pyongyang’s de-nuclearization, or to start its regime down that road. It’s emphasizing to Beijing that an increasingly powerful nuclear North Korea will inevitably lead other countries to follow suit, and place China in the middle of a ring of nuclear-armed neighbors – many of which are hardly friendly. In other words, Kissinger is identifying an especially compelling reason for China to conclude (finally) that its Korea bottom line must include defanging the North – and quickly, not one of these days.

A public statement of this reasoning also matters because it signals Kissinger’s agreement that preventing nuclear proliferation in Asia may need to take a back seat in U.S. Korea policy to the status quo/establishment position that the United States must bear the main costs and risks (including nuclear risks) of handling North Korea. Not that I doubt the dangers of a regional nuclear arms race. But if that’s the price to be paid for minimizing and possibly eliminating a nuclear to the United States itself, it’s a price that’s a clear bargain. So it’s gratifying to read that Kissinger looks to be in agreement. 

But Kissinger never explains why North Korea would relent absent the kinds of truly comprehensive and strictly enforced economic sanctions whose importance he appears to belittle or dismiss altogether. Instead, he appears to believe that a joint Sino-American statement conveying strong bilateral agreement on the peninsula’s future “would bring home to Pyongyang its isolation and provide a basis for the international guarantee essential to safeguard its outcome.” Unfortunately, nothing publicly known about the North Korean regime indicates that it’s prepared to substitute paper guarantees of its survival for the protection provided by a nuclear arsenal.

Similarly, Kissinger signals support for a solution that would leave Korea divided as at present, but that would trade off de-nuclearization in the North for a permanent ban on reintroducing American nuclear weapons to South Korea (which were removed by former President George H.W. Bush in 1991) and an international agreement prohibiting Seoul from developing its own nuclear arms. But in addition to the “paper promises” problem, Kissinger’s proposal appears to forget that nuclear weapons from anywhere have been included in strategies to defend South Korea in the first place stem from the need to offset the belligerent North’s conventional superiority – which it presumably would still enjoy. So a dangerous military imbalance would be left on the peninsula.

But my biggest complaint about Kissinger’s ideas is the apparent refusal to consider my own favored option – a U.S. military pullout from South Korea (and possibly Japan) that would deny the North any plausible reason to attack the American homeland, and that would force the powerful and wealthy countries of Northeast Asia, which have the greatest stakes by far in a viable North Korea strategy, to take on this responsibility themselves.

The risk? An entire East Asia-Pacific region that’s profoundly destabilized, and even plunged into conflict. The benefit? A dramatic reduction in the odds that a North Korean nuclear weapon would decimate an American city. Or two. Or three. This is even a close call?

Moreover, a U.S. pullout seems to be taboo to Kissinger because he, along with most of the rest of the foreign policy establishment, perversely appears to view protecting allies as being just as important as protecting the United States. What else could be mean when he warns that certain American policies “may be perceived as concentrating on protecting its own territory, while leaving the rest of Asia exposed to nuclear blackmail….”?

Not to put to fine a point on it, but when the stakes involve preventing nuclear warheads from killing possibly tens of millions of Americans, why on earth shouldn’t the United States be “perceived as concentrating on protecting its own territory”? In fact, any American leader with different priorities should be immediately removed from office and banned for life.

So I continue to admire the force of Henry Kissinger’s intellect, his mastery of a wide range of international issues (except economics), and his command of history. Yet I also continue to view him as a paragon of a peculiarly American species: a so-called diplomatic realist who is anything but.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: That North Korea Nuclear Threat? Time to Buck Up!

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deterrence, foreign policy establishment, missile defense, national security, North Korea, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Robert E. Kelly, South Korea, The National Interest

Yesterday, I wrote (again) about how America’s foreign policy establishment continues trying to keep the wool over their compatriots’ eyes about how the main U.S. security alliances (especially with South Korea) are exposing the nation to the threat of nuclear attack (in this case, from North Korea). Now I’m wondering if this same (bipartisan) group may start to change tactics. The evidence? An absolutely stupefying post in The National Interest that tries to assure Americans that such an attack wouldn’t really be so bad.

Let me repeat that: A (rightly) respected foreign policy journal has just posted an essay arguing that it’s “risky threat inflation” to believe that North Korea’s nuclear weapons represent an “existential” danger to the United States – i.e., one that could destroy it as a functioning society.

In a literal sense, the author, political scientist Robert E. Kelly, is right. Even when the North Korean dictatorship builds nuclear-tipped missiles capable of hitting the American homeland, the United States would probably survive as a political entity. The main reason, as the author notes, is that for the time being, the North’s arsenal will almost certainly remain too small to land on more than a few targets inside the geographically vast continental 48 states and their “widely dispersed population.” So just as Manhattan withstood the September 11 attack, the nation in more or less its current form could probably withstand a North Korean strike.

But this kind of literalness, of course, is the literalness of children. And nothing makes the terrible truth clearer than Kelly’s own words. For example, he writes that

>“The humanitarian costs of even one nuclear detonation would be enormous, of course, and the national psychological shock would be akin to nothing in U.S. history, bar perhaps the Civil War. But this is not the same thing as hitting the United States hard enough that its society begins to fragment and its government collapse.”

>“Large numbers of civilian casualties, even in the millions, and the loss of several American cities is not existential. Horrible, yes. A dramatic reorientation of American life, absolutely. But not the end of America.”

>“Even Imperial Japan in 1945, after months of punishing U.S. bombing, managed to ride out the nuclear detonations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki without a national breakdown.”

>“Assuming…that North Korea strikes Washington and America’s other large cities, it is not obvious that the United States would then fall into some manner of political anarchy or revolution.”

There is, to be sure, a weird twist to Kelly’s analysis. The “threat inflation” risk that’s principally troubling this South Korea-based analyst is not the kind that would cow Washington enough to prevent U.S. nuclear retaliation against North Korea following an unprovoked Northern strike against American territory. Instead, what he’s worried about is that American leaders could grow so (mistakenly) terrified of the North Korean nukes’ destructive capability that the Trump administration would try to take them out with preemptive airstrikes and thus “ignite a disastrous regional conflict.”

Which means that he’s worried mainly that South Korea and its neighbors would come under destructive attack, not the United States. But the arguments he marshals could certainly be used, at least in theory, to stiffen allegedly flaccid public spines in the event of any kind of U.S.-North Korea showdown. And as I have written repeatedly, such a confrontation would be practically unthinkable were the United States not committed to protect the militarily free-riding South, and worse, were tens of thousands of American troops and their families not deployed right in the line of Korean fire, expressly to deny a President any real choice about using nuclear weapons (and invite retaliation) once they were attacked.

Kelly’s article, however, does have one (unwitting) virtue. His description of the likely devastation from even a smallish North Korea-scale attack should be enough to make any reader wonder what possible upside to defending South Korea could come close to justifying this completely unprecedented kind of downside. The question holds even for those who insist that such an attack is unlikely (because North Korea must know that the United States would respond with an annihilating all-out retaliatory strike) and that therefore the risk is worth running in order to maintain deterrence on the peninsula. And it especially holds for missile defense optimists. For if all of them are wrong, America will suffer literally millions of deaths, countless wounded, long-term radiation poisoning of survivors and the environment, and gargantuan material losses. Even a single warhead penetrating anti-missile systems would wreak virtually unimaginable physical and psychological havoc.

Whether running such risks to deter attack – nuclear or not – on the United States itself is debatable, and although I disagree with them, pacifists and anti-nuclear activists have long made counter-arguments that deserve consideration.

But running such risks to deter attack on another country, whose loss, however terrible, Americans unmistakably could withstand (in spades) strikes me, anyway, as lying far outside the bounds of rationality. At the very least, it demands the type of open, explicit debate that the foreign policy establishment remains determined to avoid. If Kelly’s post brings this debate closer, however unintentionally, I’ll be the first one to thank him.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Hollowing Out of Globalism

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balance of power, Fareed Zakaria, foreign policy establishment, globalism, interventionism, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Trump, Vietnam War, Washington Post, William Whitworth

Nearly fifty years ago, then-New Yorker columnist William Whitworth authored one of the strongest critiques of America’s disastrous war in Vietnam. In a book based on lengthy interviews with one of the war’s prime architects, Whitworth showed clearly that America’s Vietnam intervention had become its own justification – “a tiger eating its tail.” The “best and brightest” American leaders had decided, in the words of this review, that the United States needed a balance of power in Asia to protect its interests, and it needed to protect its interests to protect the balance.  

I couldn’t help but think of Whitworth’s book when I read the latest Washington Post column by Fareed Zakaria. For this supposed strategic guru has (unwittingly, of course) indicated that he and the the rest of America’s bipartisan foreign policy establishment no longer support far-reaching U.S. global engagement and assertive leadership against perceived Trump-ian assault because they’re considered essential to achieve vital national goals. Instead, Zakaria made clear that in his own mind, this engagement and leadership has become nothing more than a good in and of itself, devoid of a concrete rationale. And because he has his finger on the establishment’s pulse, it’s likely that his colleagues’ justifications for America’s basic post-World War II diplomatic blueprint are dissolving into this form of strategic incoherence as well.

According to Zakaria, there’s strong evidence that, due to Mr. Trump’s “bizarre candidacy” and “chaotic presidency,” the world is undergoing a “bout of anti-Americanism” that “feels very different” from previous versions. Based on a recent poll, he writes that “people around the world increasingly believe that they can make do without America. Trump’s presidency is making the United States something worse than just feared or derided. It is becoming irrelevant.”

What’s most fascinating and revealing about this judgment is that Zakaria is not making the standard case that any Trump-ian or other form of retreat from the American globalism of the past 75 years or so will damage the United States directly. (It’s true that foreigners either “fearing” or especially “deriding” America could have damaging results, but the fact that Zakaria seems to regard both – strikingly different – possibilities as equally likely reveals that even he doesn’t take them especially seriously.)

Nor does Zakaria make the equally important globalist contention that such a U.S. retreat will be disastrous for the many countries that have benefited from this worldwide American engagement and leadership – and that their misfortunes will eventually harm the United States.

In fact, he’s making exactly the opposite argument – that these beneficiaries are now confident that they can stand on their own two feet.

Now there are any number of reasons to view this development with alarm – but Zakaria doesn’t make these either. And it can’t be entirely coincidental that none of them jibe well with the “enlightened” part of the “enlightened self-interest” globalists constantly insist their approach exemplifies.

For example, Zakaria and his establishment colleagues could be worried that the rest of the world is profoundly and dangerously wrong, and that globalism’s foreign beneficiaries cannot in fact “make do without America.” And the globalists could be right. But does anyone really expect Zakaria et al to start arguing that the United States and especially its globalist leaders know better what’s in those countries’ interests than foreign leaders themselves?

The Zakarias of the world could also argue that, without American leadership and engagement, the rest of the world will miss few opportunities to oppose or threaten U.S. interests. But would those countries that have been depicted for so long by the globalists as such staunch allies, which so thoroughly share American values, really change their stripes so suddenly? Could six months of a Trump presidency possibly spur such a dramatic turnabout? And why would it loom so much larger in foreign minds than the three quarters of a century of such enlightened American globalism?

Indeed, as just suggested, why isn’t Zakaria drawing from the foreign sentiments he describes a much more encouraging conclusion? That his brand of globalism has (finally!) achieved its intended goal by fostering at least in crucial centers of wealth and power like Europe and Japan both the capabilities to defend themselves when needed and the cooperative beliefs required to sustain a rules-based global political and economic order.

As I see it, the real message of Zakaria’s column is that America’s globalists have turned engagement and leadership into ends in and of themselves, like their Vietnam-era forerunners came to value the act of intervening itself higher than their eventually empty definition of victory.

But I wouldn’t exclude another possibility – which isn’t inconsistent at all with the above: That the globalists want America to keep playing international leader (or value this leadership whether it’s still real or not) simply because they find this role emotionally and psychologically gratifying, and because shilling for this position has created so many careers that have been so lavishly rewarded in so many ways.

And in this respect, the rest of us could be lucky that the Mainstream Media gives the globalists such free reign to express their unvarnished, unedited views. Because as their complaints about Trump-ian foreign policies get louder and more forceful, their fundamental irrationality could become more apparent as well.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: At the WTO, Europe Claims a Right to Free Ride

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Airbus, alliances, Boeing, Charles Dickens, Defense Department, EU, European Union, foreign policy establishment, free-riding, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, subsidies, Trade, trade law, Trump, World Trade Organization, WTO

Charles Dickens famously observed that the law can be an idiot. Last week’s World Trade Organization (WTO) ruling on U.S. and European Union (EU) aerospace subsidies reminds that American alliance policy can be idiotic – and in a key respect has been for decades. The fault here lies not with the WTO – which is hardly beyond criticism. Instead, the problem entails an American approach to international security relationships that continues a decades-long record of enabling brazen free-riding even under the current U.S. administration – which so far has decried this practice only rhetorically.

Interestingly, the WTO decision last Friday looks like a big win for American aerospace giant Boeing and a big loss for its EU rival Airbus. The trade body ruled as still illegal only one of the original 28 subsidies provided Boeing by Washington state and the federal government that were challenged by Airbus. According to Airbus, the WTO agreed with its allegation that some of the other 27 means of Boeing support were subsidies, but Boeing says that since the ruling determined that these payments had not harmed Airbus, they can remain in place. Airbus disagrees, so expect more litigation.

But here’s what’s completely outrageous. Some of the subsidies Airbus successfully challenged – at least on paper so far – were U.S. Defense Department subsidies. It’s jaw-dropping enough to recognize that Airbus gets military support, too. What’s worse is that so much of the Pentagon money handed over to Boeing (and other defense contractors) has been spent on weapons and other military systems that the United States would not need at all or in such quantity either if Washington hadn’t taken on any role in protecting Europe for decades, or if the Europeans bore anything like an appropriate burden for the own defense.

And don’t forget: For decades, even most U.S. Presidents and other foreign policy establishmentarians who have assign supreme value to continuing current transatlantic security arrangements agree that too many European members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have been shirking. Talk about biting the hand that shields you.

It’s important, however, to keep in mind who’s mainly to blame. It’s clear that the Europeans deserve no high marks for either gratitude or loyalty. But it’s also clear that their actions can be reasonably portrayed as legitimate efforts to maximize their own self interests – reflecting the equally reasonable judgment that these gambits long have been good bets to succeed.

What the American public needs to ask is (a) why their leaders have handled alliance relationships so ineptly as to have created expectations of free-riding that the WTO case shows are now seen as nothing less than a right to free-ride; and (b) whether the avowedly transactional Trump administration will view the EU defense subsidy charges as a long overdue opportunity to say enough’s enough.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Washington’s Americans Last Korea Strategy

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Asia, extended deterrence, foreign policy establishment, ICBMs, intercontinental ballistic missiles, missile defense, North Korea, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, South Korea, Trump

This post is just a quickie, since I just got back from a morning medical procedure. But it really adds some desperately needed context to all those claims that have been filling the Mainstream Media for so long characterizing President Trump as a dangerous nut when it comes to foreign policy (among other subjects), and the establishmentarians who have been conducting this foreign policy under Democratic and Republican presidents for decades as unappreciated strategic masterminds.

I guess I’d find the latter portrayal the slightest bit convincing if I hadn’t just heard the news that the United States today successfully conducted its first test launch ever of a system designed to destroy intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) before they strike their targets.

Although this development sounds good, the news should scare the bejeebers out of Americans. The reason has nothing to do with major adversaries like the Soviet Union (and now Russia) and China, which have had such missiles – capable of reaching the United States from their home countries – for decades. It’s always been deemed virtually impossible that any American defenses could keep U.S. territory adequately safe from those forces, which number in the thousands of warheads. Moreover, the political leaderships of these countries have generally been judged to be sane enough to use their nukes cautiously. As a result, protecting the nation from the proverbial mass bolt from the blue has never been seriously expected of these capabilities.

Instead, the reason for alarm has everything to do with North Korea, which has clearly been working to develop ICBM capabilities for decades, has been making impressive progress lately, and has been led by individuals who seem a lot less predictable, to put it kindly. In fact, according to this Bloomberg post, the North’s missile program dates from the mid-1970s. It tested its first with intercontinental, U.S.-striking range in 2006. And Washington has just gotten around even to testing something designed to knock one down only eleven years later?

In fact, it gets better: The interceptor that succeeded today has been used many times before to test American capabilities against shorter-range missiles. But do you know what its batting average has been since these operations began in 1999? Counting today’s success, it’s 10 for 18. That’s a performance that’s bound to get you into Cooperstown. But if the United States were attacked with 18 North Korean missiles today, it means that ten U.S. cities could become history.

By the end of this year, when the Pentagon plans to have increased the number of these systems from 36 to 44. So presumably, the odds for Americans will get better. But is there any reason to think that they’ll hit zero any time soon? That’s an especially important question to ask upon realizing that, as hostile as it is, North Korea has no intrinsic reason to launch a nuclear attack on the United States. Indeed, it has every reason to refrain from one – because it would face annihilation from vastly superior American forces. Instead, the North Korean threat stems solely from the U.S. commitment to defend South Korea from vastly superior North Korean conventional forces that the South chooses not to match. And why not? Because hiding behind American skirts is cheaper.

In other words, the U.S. government has evidently decided that it’s worth risking New York to save Seoul, even though this policy has never been openly declared to the American people. And even worse, today’s missile launch reveals that Washington has been taking its sweet time trying to make sure that millions of Americans don’t get incinerated if this policy – blandly named “extended deterrence” – fails.

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: U.S. North Korea Policy Remains Dangerously Behind the Curve Despite Signs of Progress

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alliances, Charles Krauthammer, China, deterrence, extended deterrence, Finlandization, foreign policy establishment, Japan, North Korea, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, pundits, South Korea, Trump, Washington Post

As I explained last week (not that it’s my insight alone!), America’s leading political pundits enjoy much of their fame (and consequent incomes) to their access to power. Close relations with American and other leaders can turn them into craven establishment mouthpieces when they express their own opinions. But they also enable these commentators to serve as reliable carriers of messages being sent quite deliberately by decision-makers, and by the policy specialists who advise them.

That’s why the latest column from the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer was both encouraging and discouraging when it comes to dealing with the growing nuclear weapons threat from North Korea. The good news, if Krauthammer’s piece is any guide, is that the policy community is finally starting to consider some desperately needed outside-the-box ideas for making sure that U.S. policy doesn’t wind up with Pyongyang destroying an American city or two. The bad news is that these same policy specialists and political leaders still don’t have their arms completely around this intensifying crisis.

Krauthammer’s main point seems to be that the United States still has “major cards” to play both against North Korea and against China, whose help President Trump says he’s counting on heavily to either de-nuclearize the North or somehow contain its weapons program to an acceptable degree. Some of them are pretty innovative and constructive, and per my analysis above, if he’s mentioning them, that’s a strong indication that important conventional thinkers and policymakers are mulling them, too.

For example, Krauthammer observes that Washington could ease many of China’s fears about the consequences of regime change in North Korea (which he describes nicely), and spur decisive pressures by Beijing, by “abjuring Korean reunification. This would not be Germany, where the communist state was absorbed into the West. We would accept an independent, but Finlandized, North Korea.

“During the Cold War, Finland was, by agreement, independent but always pro-Russian in foreign policy. Here we would guarantee that a new North Korea would be independent but always oriented toward China. For example, the new regime would forswear ever joining any hostile alliance.”

For my part, I agree that no significant American interests would be compromised or even affected by such a deal.

Maybe even more significantly, Krauthammer seems to be recommending that the United States suggest to China that, if it doesn’t get on the North Korea stick, South Korea and Japan would likely develop nuclear weapons themselves. As he notes, because of the history of brutal conflicts “The latter is the ultimate Chinese nightmare.”

If I’m right, this Krauthammer point signals that American policy toward Asian security (and possibly European security) could be headed for a highly welcome sea change. After all, as I’ve explained, preventing Japan’s nuclearization in particular has been a central goal of U.S. strategy in Asia since the end of World War II. Because a nuclear Japan, or even a conventionally mighty Japan, was thought too likely to return to its warlike ways, American leaders for decades have insisted on handling the job of defending Japan, and incurring many of the greatest risks – including triggering nuclear conflict.

And as you may remember, when candidate Trump suggested during his campaign for the White House that this approach be rethought, he was hammered by the bipartisan foreign policy establishment – including former President Obama – as a dangerous know-nothing.

So the change Krauthammer could be foreshadowing would represent nothing less than a U.S. foreign policy revolution.  It would mean that Washington at long last recognizes that the favorable nuclear balance that for so many years arguably made this policy of “extended deterrence” a reasonable risk is now rapidly changing for the worse. Specifically, as I’ve written, North Korea’s progress toward developing a secure retaliatory force now could be exposing the American homeland to risk that is by definition unacceptable because it’s being borne in order to protect other countries, not the United States itself.

Unfortunately, Krauthammer’s column also may add to the evidence that official and quasi-official thinking on North Korea remains way behind the curve. For example, he seems to recommend that Washington at least implicitly threaten China with the return of American nuclear weapons to South Korea if Beijing doesn’t raise its North Korea game.

Actually, this move would reduce the nuclear threat posed to the United States by war in Korea – by increasing the odds that such a conflict’s nuclear dimension would be confined to the exchange of short-or medium-range weapons whose destructive effects would be limited to the Korean peninsula. North Korea, according to the conventional and, to me, reasonable, wisdom, would continue to be deterred from launching nukes at the United States itself for fear that America would retaliate by using much more powerful intercontinental weapons that could completely annihilate the North (as well as the South).

So what’s the problem? Precisely because it alone would suffer the greatest damage, and precisely because that knowledge would make America likelier to use those short-range weapons in response to an invasion from the North, this strategy has surely become completely unacceptable to South Korea. And you can bet that neighboring Japan isn’t a big fan, either.

The Asian allies would greatly prefer that, if U.S. nuclear weapons are used in a Korean conflict, they be the weapons that shift as many risks as possible to the United States itself – and create the chance that the nuclear dimension of any Korean conflict would be fought literally over their heads. South Korea would also (legitimately) tell the United States that threatening North Korea with instantaneous nuclear destruction if it invades the South is the best way to reduce the chances of that invasion taking place to begin with. In other words, it’s the best way to strengthen deterrence and therefore preserve peace.

I know that for those outside the foreign policy community, these ideas sound completely loony. But they’re exactly the kinds of ideas that had roiled relations between the United States and its allies in Europe for decades, too.

Krauthammer also endorses, at least in principle, the notion of conveying American resolve to the North by shooting down “a North Korean missile in mid-flight to demonstrate both our capacity to defend ourselves and the futility of a North Korean missile force that can be neutralized technologically.”

He’s correct in writing that this option would be safer than a “preemptive attack on North Korea’s nuclear facilities and missile sites [which] would almost surely precipitate an invasion of South Korea with untold millions of casualties.” But what if the shoot-down attempt fails? Wouldn’t that further embolden the North? I sure as heck wouldn’t want to take that chance.

So despite the encouraging signs in Krauthammer’s column, I remain convinced that the Korean crisis is a situation where the only choices for the United States are not between good and bad, or even between bad and worse, but (because of the nuclear dimension) between perversely reckless and downright suicidal. Therefore, U.S. leaders need to capitalize on the only truly decisive asset working on their country’s behalf –America’s great distance from the peninsula – and withdraw as soon as possible the military forces still stationed in South Korea. They have no ability to advance or defend important U.S. interests at acceptable risk, but they have greatly and rapidly increasing ability to drag the nation needlessly into a potentially disastrous conflagration.

Making News: New Lifezette Column Calls America-First Approach Key to Trump China Summit Success

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Asia, China, foreign policy establishment, Lifezette.com, Making New, national security, North Korea, Trump, Xi JInPing

I’m pleased to announce the publication of my latest op-ed article:  a column on Lifezette.com that previews this week’s summit between President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.  The piece, which you can read at this link, argues that Mr. Trump and the United States will achieve the best results if the president rejects promptings from the foreign policy establishment (including some of his own top aides!) to stay the course on America’s security-focused Asia strategy. Instead, it urges the president to return to the America-First economics and trade emphasis that marked his campaign.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: New Year, New President…New Anti-Terrorism Policy?

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border security, Center for a New American Security, chattering classes, Daniel Benjamin, Daniel Henninger, foreign policy establishment, geopolitics, internationalism, ISIS, Middle East, neoconservatism, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Politico, terrorism, The Wall Street Journal, Trump

For me, one of the biggest reasons for optimism for 2017 is the election of a president ready and willing to kick over the obsolete crockery of American foreign policy and grand strategy. President-elect Trump still has to come up with his own comprehensive answers to the question, “What would come next?” His signature foreign policy speech of the campaign made that clear enough. It contained elements both of the genuine, nationalist, down-to-earth “America First” approach that I believe is urgently needed, and of the grandiose internationalist, even neoconservative blueprint that I believe must urgently be scrapped.

It’s entirely possible that this tension will complicate the new administration’s foreign policy for years to come. One reason is a simple as personnel. Because the nationalist bench is so thin, finding enough bodies to staff all the senior jobs that need to be filled will require Mr. Trump to rely on many conventional thinkers. Another has to do with the inherent difficulty of big transitions. Barring a catastrophe, they rarely happen overnight – and in many cases shouldn’t.

But because the challenge is so formidable, the overhaul effort can’t start too soon, and Americans have just received several reminders that the place to start is with fundamental geopolitics – and specifically, with my own observation that America’s immensely favorable location on the globe is an almost completely neglected diplomatic asset that Washington should try to capitalize and maximize, not seemingly intentionally squander. Put simply, those two oceans matter decisively, and coupled with the nation’s staggering treasure trove of resources and continental scale, argue compellingly for seeking progressively less, not more, global engagement. And as I’ve written, nowhere is this truer than regarding the fight against global terrorism.

In my view, little could be clearer or more promising for a geographically isolated country like the United States than the need to focus anti-ISIS etc efforts on keeping terrorists out of the country. Will a border enforcement-centric anti-terrorism policy work perfectly? Of course not. Is it a better bet for American security than pretending that even defeating ISIS will rid the dysfunctional Middle East of extremism forever, or even a few years? Or imagining that in any foreseeable future, that sad region can be turned into something other than a swamp for breeding more jihadism? That’s a total no-brainer.

But as indicated in a recent column by The Wall Street Journal‘s Daniel Henninger, America’s chattering classes have a long way to go in learning this lesson. According to Henninger, the terrorist attacks that have hit the United States lately show that “This is what it means to live as a target. What are we going to do about it? Wrap ourselves in two protective oceans?”

Moreover, a Google search quickly turned up a May report by the Center for a New American Security that reminds how deeply ingrained in the bipartisan American foreign policy establishment this belief is. According to the authors – described as “an extraordinary [and thoroughly bipartisan] group of scholars, practitioners, and journalists”:

“The best way to ensure the longevity of a rules-based international system [itself kind of a dicey notion that desperately needs rethinking] favorable to U.S. interests is not to retreat behind two oceans, lower American standards, or raise the tolerance level for risk. The proper course is to extend American power and U.S. leadership in Asia, Europe, and the Greater Middle East….”

Nonetheless, some reasons for optimism appeared last year as well. One of the most notable: An essay in Politico by Daniel Benjamin – a former Obama administration counter-terrorism official. Writing in March, Benjamin observed sagely that “While the jihadist threat is genuinely global, it is by no means equally distributed. ”

And one main reason cited by the author?

“The United States still has the blessing of geography—two oceans that mean that outside extremists will need to fly to get here. As we found on Christmas Day 2009, when Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab tried to detonate his underwear on a flight bound for Detroit, our aviation security, no-fly lists and intelligence need constant updating. But we have made major strides. By contrast, Europe, with its weak external borders, nonexistent internal borders and a migrant crisis that has brought close to a million and a half migrants into its borders, faces multiplying perils.”

And although clearly the United States has decided to “fight the terrorists over there,” Benjamin perceptively observes that it’s also made notable progress securing the border:

“One big reason why the chances of a Brussels or Paris-like attack are lower here is that we’ve been working flat out to reduce the threat for almost 15 years, since 9/11. With one of the worst extremism problems in the West, Britain has gone hard at this as well. But the same cannot be said for our Continental cousins. The United States has spent upwards of $650 billion on homeland security since 9/11. No comparable European statistic exists, but judging by law enforcement, border security and other agency budgets, the overall figures are much lower.”

I’ve been careful to argue that these two approaches aren’t mutually exclusive, and that one form of military operation in the Middle East can contribute significantly to U.S. security – at least until border controls are even stronger. That’s a campaign of anti-ISIS harassment, conducted through the air and with special forces on the ground, aimed at keeping the group off balance enough to prevent the consolidation of an Afghanistan-like base for staging September 11-scale attacks.

A somewhat larger scale anti-ISIS effort has made important progress in disrupting the group’s capabilities over the last year. But the victory will be pyrhhic if takeovers of terrorist strongholds like Mosul and Raqqa generate claims of “mission accomplished.” Benjamin is right to warn against U.S. complacency. But that’s likeliest to be prevented if the hard, unglamorous, continuing work of better securing the border moves to center stage in Washington’s anti-terrorism policy.