Im-Politic: After Mueller/Barr, Can Trump Be Trump?

Tags

America First, Attorney General, Betsy de, budgets, conservatism, conservatives, establishment Republicans, foreign policy, globalism, healthcare, Im-Politic, Immigration, impeachment, Kevin McCarthy, Obamacare, Populism, Republicans, Robert Mueller, Ross Douthat, seasonal workers, Special Counsel, Special Olympics, tax cuts, The New York Times, Trade, Trump, Trump-Russia, visas, William P. Barr

A week ago, I posted on the likely political impact of the end of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of what have become known as the Trump-Russia scandals and of the release of Attorney General William P. Barr’s summary of its principal conclusions – which appear to put these charges and the threat of presidential impeachment they created behind Mr. Trump.

Now it’s time to think about a related and at least equally important subject: the policy effects. They could be profound enough to redefine the Trump presidency and the chief executive’s chances for reelection – even though the early indications seem to be saying exactly the opposite in ways that are sure to disappoint much of Mr. Trump’s political base. Here’s what I mean.

Ever since his administration’s opening months, I’ve believed that Mr. Trump’s policy choices have been strongly influenced by impeachment fears. Specifically, (and I have zero first-hand knowledge here) because President Trump feared that the Democrats and many mainstream Republicans were after his scalp, he concluded that he needed to appease his remaining allies in the latter’s ranks with policy initiatives they’ve long supported even though they broke with his own much less conventional and more populist campaign promises. 

In other words, it was the Russia and related scandal charges that were preventing “Trump from being Trump.”  

Moreover, this reasoning makes sense even if the President was certain that he faced no legal jeopardy. For impeachment ultimately is a political process, and although establishing criminal guilt is clearly helpful, it’s not essential.

The main evidence for my proposition has been the early Trump decision to prioritize Obamacare repeal over trade policy overhaul and infrastructure building; his almost libertarian-like initial budget proposal (at least when it comes to non-defense discretionary federal pending); his business-heavy tax cut; and numerous foreign policy moves that more closely resembled the globalist approaches he decried while running for the White House than the America First strategy his promised.

But although President Trump now seems certain to finish out his first term in office, he still seems to be currying favor with the Republican establishment. Just look at his latest budget proposal, and decision to go after Obamacare again – the healthcare move reportedly made despite the pleas of establishment Republicans like House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy to move on from an issue now stamped as a major loser politically and threat to the party’s 2020 election prospects across the board.

It’s true that many of Mr. Trump’s trade and immigration policies still clash with the donor-driven agenda of the Republican establishment, and especially the party’s Congressional leaders. But even on these signature issues, the President arguably could be breaking even more sharply with the longstanding Republican and conservative traditions.

For example, Mr. Trump continues to keep suspended his threat of higher tariffs on many imports from China in apparent hopes of reaching a successful trade deal even though Beijing still seems determined to avoid significant concessions on “structural issues” (like intellectual property theft and technology extortion) and on enforcement.

On immigration, the President has just raised the 2019 cap on visas for unskilled largely seasonal foreign guest workers to levels never reached even during the Obama years. His administration also has permitted visas for farm workers to hit record levels and done little to stem the growth of work permits for foreign graduates of U.S. college and universities that critics charge suppress wages for high skill native-born workers.

One intriguing explanation for this continuing policy schizophrenia comes from New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. In a piece this past weekend, Douthat made the case that, although President Trump’s actual record has been largely heretical in mainstream conservative terms, when it comes to staffing (and especially key staff positions)

“there are effectively two Trump presidencies. One offers something like what the president promised on the campaign trail — a break with Paul Ryan’s green-eyeshade approach to entitlement reform, a more moderate tack on health care, an indifference to Obama-era conservative orthodoxies on fiscal and monetary policy.

“The other offers a continuation of the Tea Party’s insistence on spending cuts and Obamacare repeal, and appropriately its present leader is a former Tea Party congressman — Mick Mulvaney, the Zelig of the administration, whose zeal is apparently the main reason that the Obamacare lawsuit now has administration support.”

And the main reason for this confusing mix? The President has relied “on personnel who are associated with 2010-era G.O.P. orthodoxy, rather than elevating the kind of conservatives who have actively theorized for a more populist right.”

It’s so hard to argue with Douthat’s facts that I won’t. But they still leave the main puzzle unexplained – why so many of the President’s personnel picks have been so un-Trumpian. And much of the answer points to a problem that was clear to me ever since Mr. Trump’s presidential candidacy achieved critical mass and momentum, and that doesn’t seem solvable for the foreseeable future.

Specifically, as I’ve previously noted, conservative populists (I’m never been thrilled with this description of “Trumpism,” but for the time being it’s convenient) have never created the institutions and therefore cohorts of first-rate policy specialists remotely capable of staffing a conservative populist administration. Even if you want to identify immigration as an exception – where organizations like the Center for Immigration Studies put out top-flight studies – it’s clear that nothing of the kind has ever existed on the trade and foreign policy fronts.

And even worse, because of the long lead-times needed to achieve these goals, Mr. Trump appears doomed to dealing with shortages of competent true-believers as far as the eye can see. In fact, he’ll face a special challenge in the next few months, as the second halves of first presidential terms tend to see the departures of many early, often burned out appointees. And of course, the Trump presidency has already experienced much more than its share of turnover.

So I’m expecting an indefinite continuation of the eye-popping sequence of events of the previous week – in which Trump Education Secretary Betsy deVos announced an end to federal funding of the popular Special Olympics program, a public outcry ensued, and the President abruptly reversed her decision.

It’s hard to imagine that this kind of zigging and zagging can win President Trump reelection. But it’s also conceivable that the post-impeachment situation will “Let Trump be Trump” just enough – especially if the Democrats err in picking an overall strategy for opposing him.  After all, nothing has been more common in recent American political history than completely off-base predictions of Mr. Trump’s demise.

Advertisements

Im-Politic: Out of the Mouths of Globalists – A Case for the Wall

Tags

Afghanistan, America First, border security, border wall, foreign policy, globalism, government shutdown, Im-Politic, Immigration, jihadism, Middle East, State of the Union, terrorism, The New York Times, Trump

With the possibility of another Border Wall-related government shutdown hanging over tonight’s State of the Union – and all of American politics – it’s pretty astonishing to recognize that The New York Times editorial board, which strongly opposes the wall, and which has long championed a globalist approach to foreign policy issues, has just unwittingly endorsed a Trump-ian, America First-style approach to border security.

The endorsement came in The Times‘ recent editorial calling for a prompt U.S. military pullout from Afghanistan – a position that’s also decidedly Trump-ian.

According to Times editorial writers, the main rationale originally cited for fighting in Afghanistan was flawed from the start. It focused too tightly on

“the idea that war abroad could prevent bloodshed at home. As [then President George W. Bush] explained in 2004: ‘We are fighting these terrorists with our military in Afghanistan and Iraq and beyond so we do not have to face them in the streets of our own cities.’”

Globalists well to the left of Bush endorsed this rationale as well, notably former President Barack Obama. His first bid for the White House stressed that Afghanistan was a “good war” and a conflict that “had to be won” in order to “take the fight to the terrorists” – in stark contrast to Mr. Bush’s “dumb” war in Iraq.

But The Times – which admirably recognizes that it bought this line as well – now suggests that this argument never made much sense. Although acknowledging that “since 9/11, no foreign terrorist group has conducted a deadly attack inside the United States,” it adds that

“there have been more than 200 deadly terrorist attacks during that period, most often at the hands of Americans radicalized by ideologies that such groups spread. Half of those attacks were motivated by radical Islam, while 86 came at the hands of far-right extremists.”

The Times doesn’t draw the obvious implication, but it couldn’t be clearer even to a minimally perceptive observer: The kinds of terrorist threats the paper spotlights have appeared in the United States in large measure because border security has been so shoddy for so long. In particular, American immigration authorities have never adequately screened newcomers from countries where radical Islam has taken root, and who are therefore unusually vulnerable to radicalization.

It’s conceivable that border security could effectively address these challenges without the kind of physical barriers now sought by President Trump – and demonized by most of Congress’ Democrats. But at the least, The Times‘ rationale strongly militates for other Trump-ian, America First-style border security measures, like applying travel bans against countries that are known hotbeds of terrorism and strict limits on admitting refugees and asylum-seekers from these same points of origin.

And barriers look especially important given the extensive legal/due process protections now automatically awarded to anyone who sets foot on American soil, including from countries whose threadbare (at best) governments lack the capacity to document the identity of their residents satisfactorily. Therefore, adequate vetting by the U.S. government will be excruciatingly difficult, to put it mildly.

But if The Times wants to clinch the case for withdrawing promptly from Afghanistan, it should make a point I’ve made repeatedly: It will be far easier to protect against terrorist threats by relying mainly on border security because access to the country is something Washington can reasonably hope to control. Protecting against terrorist threats mainly by chasing jihadists around a completely dysfunctional region of the world whose greatest strength is spawning extremism would base American strategy on something Washington can’t reasonably hope to control.

And of course, connecting an end to massive American military involvement in the Middle East with the need for more secure borders could only bolster President Trump’s position, too.

Im-Politic: Where McCain Fell (Way) Short

Tags

America First, foreign policy, globalism, Im-Politic, Immigration, isolationism, John McCain, Mainstream Media, nativism, protectionism, Trade, Trump

I spent a fair amount of this past weekend thinking of something to write about John McCain that would adequately explain why my long-time (and continuing) irritation with the late Arizona Republican Senator goes considerably deeper than my opposition to his stances on specific issues like trade, immigration, and foreign policy – and in particular why it was never offset much by any admiration for his instances of political independence, his efforts at bipartisanship, or even his military service.

Not that I don’t admire these widely noted traits and that portion of his bio. But here’s what truly rankles – and should bother you – especially amid the torrent of praise about how McCain supposedly kept the tone of American politics elevated while so many around him (notably President Trump) worked so hard (and successfully) to degrade it: When it came to the issues listed above, he rarely, if ever, resisted the temptation to to portray anyone opposed to what today are called globalist positions in the worst possible light – as selfish protectionists, as xenophobes, and as head-in-the-sand isolationists.

If you’re skeptical, check out statements like

>”Americans don’t run from the challenge of a global economy. We are the world’s leaders, and leaders don’t fear change, hide from challenges, pine for the past and dread the future.

“That’s why I reject the false virtues of economic isolationism.”  (Here’s the source.)

>“To abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.” (Here’s the source.)

>”We have to fight isolationism, protectionism, and nativism. We have to defeat those who would worsen our divisions. We have to remind our sons and daughters that we became the most powerful nation on earth by tearing down walls, not building them.”  (Here’s the source.)

Beliefs and accusations like these have become so commonplace – largely because they are so enthusiastically promoted by the Mainstream Media – that it’s far too easy to overlook their destructive effects. For these issues, which obviously were so important to McCain, and which not so coincidentally were central to the success of his bitter rival, President Trump, present Americans with powerful and complex questions.

Of course, there’s a compelling case that can still be made for what nowadays are called the globalist views championed so vigorously by McCain. But after the kinds of disasters and blunders represented by the Vietnam and second Iraq Wars, by a terrifying worldwide financial crisis and the worst economic downturn in decades, and by enabling the rise of China, clearly there’s also a compelling case to made for pushing back against the grandiose assumptions about U.S. interests and the nation’s place in the world that underlie them.

In fact, had the bipartisan globalist establishment encouraged, or even allowed, thoroughgoing debate over the assumptions when their vulnerabilities started emerging decades ago, some of the most recent debacles might have been avoided. Instead, the powers-that-be focused on preventing or limiting those debates, and in particular on marginalizing dissenters by casting exactly the kind of intellectual and moral aspersions peddled by McCain. And don’t doubt for a minute that this intolerance accounted for much of McCain’s adoration by a Mainstream Media whose zeal for globalism has been equally extreme, and whose determination to depict the nation’s only choices on trade, immigration, and foreign policy, as black or white has been just as strong.

In other words, the late Arizona Senator denied to his opponents on trade, immigration, and foreign policy issues the credit for good intentions – and the very aura of legitimacy itself – that he famously and laudably extended to his 2008 presidential rival, then-Senator Barack Obama, when he firmly rebuked a voter for portraying the Democratic nominee as an anti-American “Arab.”

Was McCain the worst globalist politician on this score? I’m sure I could find examples of peers who took even lower roads. But on these crucial subjects, he wasn’t notably better. For that reason alone, the election of Donald Trump, and the marked America First turn of the Republican party it has revealed, was a defeat that the McCain and globalists in general richly deserved.

Im-Politic: New Evidence that Trump-Russia is a Voter Nothing-Burger

Tags

2016 elections, 2020 elections, collusion, foreign policy, Gallup, Im-Politic, midterm elections, polls, public opinion, Russia, Trump, Trump-Russia

I know that it’s only one poll, and that poll results can be pretty dodgy. (See “2016 U.S. Presidential Election.”) But the results of a new Gallup survey on Americans’ views towards U.S.-Russia relations seem well worth spotlighting anyway, especially given the continuing unrelenting headlines being generated by the alleged Trump-Russia scandals, by all the evidence of Russian meddling in American politics, and various investigations of the above.

Gallup asked respondents whether it’s “more important to improve relations with Russia” or “more important to take strong diplomatic and economic steps against Russia.” And by a healthy 58 percent to 36 percent margin, the “improve relations” option won out. Just as striking is that a hard line against Moscow is strongly opposed even though 75 percent of the public believes that Russia interfered in the last presidential election, and 39 percent believes that such activities “changed the outcome.”

As predictable these days, these views are sharply divided along partisan lines. But what’s less predictable is that the Democrats come across as the most intense partisans by far. To be sure, their support for a “hard” vs a “soft” line toward Russia wasn’t overwhelming – 51 percent for the former, 45 percent for the latter. But it contrasted sharply not only with the opinion of Republicans (who favored a softer line by a lopsided 74 percent to 22 percent margin). Democrats’ views also differed significantly from those of independents (who favored a softer line by 55 percent to 37 percent).

And this Gallup survey makes it tough to blame supposed public apathy or ignorance for these findings. Specifically, two-thirds of respondents told Gallup they were following news about Russia and the 2016 election “closely” and 33 percent reported following such developments “very closely.” Gallup contends that this level of attention is “slightly above” the norm for their news attentiveness results going back to 1991.

Moreover, Gallup reports that the more closely its sample members followed the story, the likelier they were to believe that Russia interfered and that its interference mattered. Indeed, ninety percent of the true newshounds accepted the meddling claims. But only 51 percent of this highly attentive group believed that the alleged Russian operations changed the outcome. And those respondents who were following such news only somewhat closely split nearly evenly on the matter (with 42 percent agreeing that the meddling affected the outcome and 40 percent disagreeing)

The same pattern was evident when it came to views on Russia relations options. Of those Americans following these stories very closely, a majority favored the harder line. But the margin was only 53 percent to 42 percent. The results for Americans following the Russia coverage only somewhat closely was the reverse – and then some. Only thirty-seven percent backed the hard line while fully 59 percent opposed it.

When combined with other Gallup findings that, through June, the constellation of Trump-Russia issues wasn’t even moving the needle in terms of Americans’ rankings of their top concerns, this new survey indicates that, unless a genuine smoking gun is uncovered, Democrats would be best advised to stress other anti-Trump messages in their campaigns this year to regain control of Congress. For if voters were strongly responsive, wouldn’t they be demanding that their leaders make Russia pay dearly for an attack on their democracy? At the same time, since voter turnout in mid-term elections is typically very low, hammering away at Russia and impeachment etc could possibly bring to the polls more “resistance” true believers and swing some close races.

The implications for the next presidential race – again, barring a smoking fun – seem clearer: In such a generally higher turnout race, voters are likely to be paying much more attention to the standard array of pocketbook and cultural issues (along with foreign policy, if crises break out) than to whatever’s left of the Trump-Russia controversy.

Making News: A Major New Article on “America First” Foreign Policy, a Return to National Radio – & More!

Tags

America First, China, foreign policy, globalization, Making News, national security, Newsmax Now, Newsmax TV, tariffs, The John Batchelor Show, The National Interest, Trade, trade wars, Trump

I’m pleased to announce that a major new article of mine on the future of U.S. foreign policy has just been published in The National Interest.  Titled “America First at Home and Abroad,” it looks at the heated debate over President Trump’s approach to international relations from a wholly new standpoint.

Rather than attacking or defending the President’s stances, the piece argues that Mr. Trump’s departure from the nation’s decades-long globalist strategy is much more bark than bite so far, describes what a genuine ‘America First” policy capable of attracting public and political support would look like, and makes the case that such a strategy is likeliest to serve U.S. security and economic interests going forward.

In addition, I’m scheduled to return to John Batchelor’s nationally syndicated radio show tonight at 9 PM EST to help John and co-host Gordon G. Chang provide updated coverage of President Trump’s China trade policies.  Click here to listen live on-line to what’s sure to be a timely and provocative discussion.

And last night, the Newsmax TV program “Newsmax Now” ran a backgrounder segment on U.S.-China trade relations based largely on my analysis of the subject.  Here’s the link; the backgrounder begins at about the 33:40 mark.

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

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Case for a “Made in America” Approach

Tags

Africa, AIDS, border security, climate change, corruption, diseases, foreign policy, foreign policy establishment, globalism, HIV, human rights, internationalism, Iran, Iran deal, Islamic terrorism, Israel, Jeffrey Goldberg, Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Middle East, missile defense, nuclear proliferation, oil, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, population control, Project-Syndicate.org, shale, terrorism, The New York Times, Thomas Friedman

I’m picking on New York Times uber-pundit Thomas Friedman again today – not because of any personal animus, but because, as noted yesterday, he’s such an effective, influential creator of and propagandist for the conventional wisdom on so many public policy fronts. And just to underscore that it’s nothing personal, I’ll also put in my cross-hairs another, though lower profile, thought leader: Harvard political scientist Joseph S. Nye, Jr. The reason? Both recently have provided us with quintessential illustrations of how lazy – and indeed juvenile – the justifications for American international activism served up by the bipartisan foreign policy establishment have grown.

The analyses I’m talking about aren’t quite as childishly simplistic as the establishment theme I wrote about last month – the assumption that American involvement in alliances and international organizations and regimes is automatically good, and that withdrawal or avoidance is automatically bad. But because it’s a little more sophisticated, it can be even more harmful. It’s the insistence that whenever the United States faces a problem with an international dimension, the remedy is some form of international engagement.

A recent Friedman column revealed one big weakness with this assumption: It often logically leads to the conclusion that a problem is utterly hopeless, at least for the foreseeable future. Just think about the only sensible implications of this October 31 article, which insists that the apparently metastasizing threat of Islamic terrorism in Africa can’t be adequately dealt with through the military tools on which the Trump administration is relying.

Why not? “Because what is destabilizing all of these countries in the Sahel region of Africa and spawning terrorist groups is a cocktail of climate change, desertification — as the Sahara steadily creeps south — population explosions and misgovernance.

“Desertification is the trigger, and climate change and population explosions are the amplifiers. The result is a widening collapse of small-scale farming, the foundation of societies all over Africa.”

I have no doubt that Friedman is right here. And as a result, he has a point to slam the Trump administration “for sending soldiers to fight a problem that is clearly being exacerbated by climate and population trends….” (That’s of course a prime form of American international activism.)

But he veers wildly off course in suggesting that other forms of such activism – “global contraception programs,” “U.S. government climate research” and the like are going to do much good, especially in the foreseeable future. Unless he supposes that, even if American policies turned on a dime five or even ten years ago, Africa would be much less of a mess? The only adult conclusion possible is that nothing any government can do is going to turn the continent into something other than a major spawning ground for extremism and refugees.

And this conclusion looks especially convincing considering the African problem to which Friedman – and so many other supporters of such approaches – gives short shrift: dreadfully corrupt governments. For this is a problem that has afflicted Africa since the countries south of the Sahara began gaining their independence from European colonialists in the late-1950s. (And the colonialists themselves weren’t paragons of good government, either.)

So I’m happy to agree that we shouldn’t pretend that sending American special forces running around Africa helping local dictators will actually keep the terrorists under control (although as I’ve argued in the case of the Middle East, such deployments could helpfully keep them off balance). But let’s not pretend that anything Friedman supports will help, either – at least in the lifetime of anyone reading this.

Nye has held senior government foreign policy posts in Democratic administrations and, in the interests of full disclosure, we have crossed swords in print – mainly about the proper definition of internationalism and about a review of an anthology he edited that he didn’t like (which doesn’t seem to be on-line). But I hope you agree that there’s still a big problem with his November 1 essay for Project-Syndicate.org about the implications of America’s domestic energy production revolution for the nation’s approach to the Middle East.

In Nye’s words: “Skeptics have argued that lower dependence on energy imports will cause the US to disengage from the Middle East. But this misreads the economics of energy. A major disruption such as a war or terrorist attack that stopped the flow of oil and gas through the Strait of Hormuz would drive prices to very high levels in America and among our allies in Europe and Japan. Besides, the US has many interests other than oil in the region, including nonproliferation of nuclear weapons, protection of Israel, human rights, and counterterrorism.”

Two related aspects of this list of reasons for continued American engagement in the region stand out. First, it’s completely indiscriminate. And second, for this reason, it completely overlooks how some of these unmistakably crucial U.S. interests can be much more effectively promoted or defended not through yet more American intervention in this increasingly dysfunctional region, but through changes in American domestic policies.

For instance, we’re (rightly) worried about nuclear proliferation, especially in Iran? How can today’s engagement policy help? Even if the the current Iran nuclear deal works exactly as intended, what happens when it runs out? Should we simply assume that Tehran will be happy to keep its nuclear genie in a bottle for another fifteen years? Will Iran be persuaded to give up the nuclear option permanently if Washington cultivates even closer ties with its age-old Sunni Muslim enemies, like Saudi Arabia?

Although I’m a missile defense skeptic – especially when it comes to the near-term threat from North Korea – isn’t figuring out a more effective way to repel an Iranian strike more likely to protect the American homeland? It’s certainly a response over which the United States will have much more control – and indeed, any control. In addition, if the United States withdraws militarily from the Persian Gulf region, Iran’s reason for launching such an attack in the first place fades away and, as I’ve argued in the case of North Korea, America’s own vastly superior nuclear forces become a supremely credible deterrent for any other contingencies.

Of course the United States faces a big Middle East-related terrorism problem. But as I’ve argued previously, the keys to America’s defense are serious border security measures. They, too, pass the “control test” with flying colors, and consequently seem much more promising than the status quo approach of trying to shape the region’s future in more constructive ways. But as I’ve also written, it would also make sense to keep in the Middle East small-scale American forces whose mission is continually harassing ISIS and Al Qaeda and whatever other groups of vicious nutballs are certain to appear going forward.

Nye’s point about the integration of global energy markets is a valid one. But in the same article, he acknowledges how the U.S. domestic energy revolution’s “combination of entrepreneurship, property rights, and capital markets” has changed the game for America. Why does he suppose that its effects won’t spread significantly beyond our borders?

As for Nye’s other two reasons for continued U.S. Middle East engagement, the notion that Washington can do anything meaningful to promote the cause of human rights simply isn’t serious, and Israel has amply demonstrated that, with enough American military aid, it can take care of itself.

Moreover, as you may recognize, the arguments for mainly focusing on border security to handle the Middle East terrorist threat applies to the African menace that’s preoccupying Friedman.

The main takeaway here isn’t that U.S. international engagement will never be needed to protect national security, safeguard the nation’s independence, or enhance its prosperity. It’s that Made in America approaches will turn out to be vastly superior in many cases – and certainly in many more cases than the bipartisan globalist foreign policy establishment recognizes. How long will it take for President Trump to get fully on board?

By the way, I first began exploring the idea of Made in America solutions to foreign policy problems and international threats when I read this article by current Atlantic Monthly Editor Jeffrey Goldberg. He argued in 1999 that the nation was making a big mistake ignoring Africa in its diplomacy because the continent was likely to become a source of deadly diseases sure to cross oceans and eventually afflict Americans and others; that “H.I.V., of course, is a particularly vicious warning shot”; and that it was high time for Washington to deal with “poverty, poor sanitation and political instability” as well as put “a global system of public health and disease surveillance in place.”

Not that Goldberg presented a stark either-or choice, but my reaction was “If we do need to figure out whether to place more AIDS-fighting emphasis on promoting African economic development, or on finding a cure through medical research, isn’t the latter much likelier to deliver major results much sooner?”

As is clear from the Friedman article, Africa’s array of problems continues unabated. And according to no less than the (devoutly globalist) Obama administration, as of last year, the United States was “on the right track to reach most of its “National HIV/AIDS Strategy” goals for 2020 – which seek an America that’s “a place where new HIV infections are rare” and where “high quality, life-extending care” is available.

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

Tags

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But then he immediately turned around and admitted,

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

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

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

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

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Uses and Mis-Uses of Thucydides

Tags

balance of power, China, Destined for War, East Asia, foreign policy, geopolitics, globalism, Graham Allison, international order, internationalism, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, realism, strategy, The History of the Peloponnesian Wae, Thucydides, Thucydides Trap

It’s always great to learn that U.S. leaders are working hard to use history to inform their policy decisions – unless they’re completely misreading the relevance of lessons of the past to America’s current circumstances, as could well be the case with senior Trump administration officials and their fascination with Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War.

Don’t get me wrong: This chronicle of conflicts between ancient Athens and Sparta is a genuine classic both of military history and international relations theory. I hold it in particularly high regard because it contains a seminal argument for viewing the latter through a “realist” lens, emphasizing that countries act, in the words of one recent description, “out of pragmatic self-interest, with little regard for ideology, values or morality.”

But according to an account that came out last week (and that hasn’t been denied), top Trump foreign policy and national security aides are viewing Thucydides as a valuable guide to answering the question of whether war between the United States and China is inevitable. And their interest in the History has been encouraged by the work of a leading modern scholar, Harvard University’s Graham Allison. Allison has applied what’s widely regarded as Thucydides’ main conclusion – that established powers find it intrinsically and understandably difficult to deal with rising powers peacefully – to the U.S.-China situation, and in the process, he’s drawn a lot of attention in Beijing as well as Washington.

But there’s a major problem with focusing on whether the United States and China are stuck in a “Thucydides Trap” that makes war just about inevitable (Allison is not nearly so pessimistic), and examining past international rivalries for insights (his major contribution to the debate). As with so many mainstream analyses of American foreign policy for decades, Allison – and the Trump-ers apparently paying him heed – have completely forgotten the distinctive geopolitical and economic advantages the United States brings to international relations.

As I’ve written previously, the United States enjoys the kind of geographic isolation, military power, and capacity for economic self-sufficiency that enables it to view most overseas developments with relative indifference – provided that it maintains these strengths. And for all the important nuance he brings to his treatment of U.S.-China relations, it’s clear that Allison has overlooked what’s genuinely special about the American position, too.

Although I haven’t read Allison’s full Thucydides Trap book yet, I have read this lengthy magazine version. And it shows unmistakably that his warning that “Based on the current trajectory, war between the United States and China in the decades ahead is not just possible, but much more likely than recognized at the moment” accepts the same longstanding American globalist assumptions that have led to so many costly U.S. foreign policy mistakes since the end of World War II.

For example, Allison has a great deal to teach if it’s true that the United States has an intrinsic need to worry greatly about developments or questions like

>”a rising power…threatening to displace a ruling power”:

>”a rapid shift in the balance of power between two rivals”:

>”the rising power’s growing entitlement, sense of its importance, and demand for greater say and sway”;

>the fact that “Never before in history has a nation risen so far, so fast, on so many dimensions of power”:

>whether China is “restored to its rightful place, where its power commands recognition of and respect for China’s core interests”;

>whether “the growing trend toward a multipolar [as opposed to a U.S.-led] world will not change”;

But nowhere has he made this case for these concerns. Indeed, by and large, like other mainstream analysts and leaders, he simply assumes their crucial importance, without explaining how they could affect the nation’s safety, independence, and well-being directly and decisively.

Allison (along with the rest of the foreign policy mainstream, whose dominance is as complete on the conventional American Left as on the Right) gets more specific, and his analysis becomes more useful, when he raises questions like: ”Could China become #1? In what year could China overtake the United States to become, say, the largest economy in the world, or primary engine of global growth, or biggest market for luxury goods?”

And he identifies and expresses even more concrete core mainstream worries:

>First, whether China’s “current leaders [are] serious about displacing the U.S. as the predominant power in Asia?”’

>Second, both more broadly and more centrally “the impact that China’s ascendance will have on the U.S.-led international order, which has provided unprecedented great-power peace and prosperity for the past 70 years.”

But like the first set of worries, even these concerns should be treated as first-order issues by Americans only if they assume that, as with much less secure and inherently wealthy powers, either their security, prosperity, and independence are crucially reliant on the international environment, or that these aims are much more safely and efficiently achieved through international activism than through enhancing their abilities to deal with challenges and withstand crises acceptably in a turbulent international environment.

If the long-held globalist views stressing America’s relative vulnerability or dependence are accepted, then all of Allison’s questions remain vital – from the least tangible (like whether China wins more influence overall) to the most (whether China wants to replace the United States as Asia’s kingpin). And the fate of that “U.S.-led international order” (including preserving American primacy in Asia) ultimately matters most of all because it’s seen to be the only acceptable or only feasible guarantor of a satisfactory national future.

If, however, that assumption about the present international order is fatally flawed, then even subjects like the relative overall balance of power between the United States and China become secondary. They would logically cede pride of place to the issue of whether America’s power (in any dimension) is adequate to achieve specific national objectives or maintain valued national advantages. For even though relative power will of course influence success or failure, in the final analysis, the decisive consideration is whether that power is sufficient to achieve those particular successes and maintain those particular advantages, not whether America in some general sense “matches up” with other countries.

As always with these posts on overall foreign policy strategy, the main takeaway here isn’t that Allison and the other globalists are wrong and that I’m right. The main point is that the globalist school has – wittingly or not – long not only opposed, but defined out of existence, alternative approaches to security and prosperity that dovetail well with many of the nation’s most conspicuous strengths.

Here’s another way to put it: In his article, Allison expressly states that his detailed look at “16 cases over the last 500 years in which there was a rapid shift in the relative power of a rising nation that threatened to displace a ruling state….” But all entailed “the struggle for mastery in Europe and Asia over the past half millennium….” When globalists like him can explain why the geopolitical and economic similarities between the United States and these historic powers – or between ancient Athens and Sparta – count much more than the differences, they’ll be entitled to claim victory in their on-again-off-again debate with those favoring less ambitious over America’s foreign policy strategy. Until then, however, their opponents will be entitled to claim that they’ve managed to avoid the biggest questions.

Im-Politic: How I Scooped The Times on Trump and Nationalism 25 Years Ago

Tags

America First, Democrats, elites, environmentalists, foreign policy, globalism, globalization, Im-Politic, Immigration, internationalism, interventionism, middle class, minoriites, nationalism, politics, Populism, Republicans, sovereignty, The National Interest, The New York Times, Thomas Edsall, Trade, Trump, working class

However conceited it sounds, it really is time – again – 🙂 to pat myself on the back. This morning’s New York Times featured a long analysis by contributor Thomas Edsall titled “The End of Left and Right as We Knew Them.” The main thesis (as per a quote from the director of the “International Institutions and Global Governance Program” at the Council on Foreign Relations):

“The most salient political division today is not between conservatives and liberals in the United States or social democrats in the United Kingdom and France, but between nationalists and globalists.”

Edsall himself elaborates:

“By now it has become quite clear that conservative parties in Europe and the United States have been gaining strength from white voters who have been mobilized around issues related to nationalism — resistance to open borders and to third-world immigration. … On the liberal side, the Democratic Party and the center-left European parties have been allied in favor of globalization, if we define globalization as receptivity to open borders, the expansion of local and nationalistic perspectives and support for a less rigid social order and for liberal cultural, immigration and trade policies.”

Moreover, at the heart of these new divisions are class distinctions: The nationalists on both sides of the Atlantic are likeliest to be relatively poor and relatively uneducated – although Edsall does present research findings showing – unconvincingly in my view – that classic “racial resentment, more than economic anxiety, influenced the [U.S.} presidential election.”

Yet the author also unmistakably believes that the left “In recent decades…both in Europe and in the United States [has] begun to include and reflect the views of large numbers of well-educated elites — relatively affluent knowledge or creative class workers….” Indeed, he coins a nice phrase: “The rise of the affluent left.”

So what does this have to do with yours truly? Plenty. Because nearly 25 years ago, I predicted the development of exactly the same trend. My forecast came in an article for the journal The National Interest that was called (wait for it) “Beyond Left and Right” – and it got a fair amount of media attention from both liberals and conservatives. (The National Interest itself is on the right end of the spectrum.) 

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find versions on-line that aren’t behind pay walls, but here are a few excerpts from a dog-eared xerox:

“…a new underlying fault line [replacing the old left-right divisions] is already emerging in American foreign policy, dividing what might best be called nationalists and internationalists. In terms of American diplomacy, this new alignment will pit a generic model of foreign policy-making that long predates the Cold War – one based at bottom…on the belief that international activism itself is the key to American security and prosperity – against a rival approach…whose supreme goal is consolidating American military and economic strength, and enhancing America’s freedom of action. In the realm of economic policy, those who argue that the nation-state, as an economic player, is obsolete or dangerous will vie with those convinced of its continuing relevance and legitimacy. In electoral politics, sharp differences in economic interests and cultural outlooks will produce a widening rift between business, professional,and government elites on the one hand, and wage-earners on the other. The issue of class, in other words, is re-emerging in American politics.”

I added that these divisions were arising from “the different impact of world economic trends on different classes” and were producing “a foreign policy debate [that] increasingly pits social and economic classes against each other, focusing on the questions of who pays the costs and who incurs most of the risks involved in competing economic and security policies.

“Polls repeatedly show that the best educated and wealthiest Americans are the staunchest internationalists on both security and economic issues. The surveys also show strong support for internationalist policies to be lacking nearly everywhere else on the social spectrum. “

And there’s more. I wrote that “At the mass public level,” the nationalist faction would be comprised of “blue collar union members, white collar middle managers and small businessmen from the Perotista ranks; family- and community-oriented immigrants; and grassroots environmental activists.”

As for their rivals, “The social base of internationalism would include many big multinational businesses and their upper level managers, financiers, professionals, and retailers. Journalists and the rest of the mass media, as well as academics, also tend to support an idealistic globalism. Other members of a new internationalist coalition might include minorities whose fear of cultural conservative nationalists outweighs their qualms about job-destroying internationalist free-trade economics, and affluent, mainstream environmentalists.”

And there was more on the role of the media: “Much of what they lack in numbers, the internationalists would make up for in money, influence, and the aura of respectability that their media allies will continue to provide.”

What would happen to liberal and conservative internationalists in the process? The former

“may wind up permanently alienating labor, minorities, and the white-collar middle class whether they intend to or not – and lose their identity as champions of the underdog and as agents of progressive change in the process. Internationalists of the Right will face similar problems. Without offering their voters something more than NAFTA, the continuing “creative destruction” of their jobs, endless foreign interventions, and Marilyn Quayle’s definition of family values, it is difficult to see them avoiding George [H.W.] Bush’s political fate.”

For good measure, I added that if they do crystallize, the resulting new coalitions are likely to be “less inclined to compromise than their predecessors….”

Clearly, I didn’t get everything right. But I’m kind of amazed at how many developments I absolutely nailed. Further, we’re only a few months into the Trump era. In other words, the American political realignment I anticipated still probably has a long ways to go.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Desperately Seeking Adult Polling on NATO

Tags

allies, burden sharing, defense spending, foreign policy, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, nuclear war, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Pew Research Center, polls, Russia, Trump, vital interests

There’s not much doubt that the main purpose of this recent Pew Research Center poll was to show the unpopularity in America of President Trump’s skeptical views of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Published just before this past week’s summit of the U.S. defense alliance with many European countries, the survey finds that “Today, roughly six-in-ten Americans hold a favorable opinion of the security alliance….”

So that seems to be quite the rebuke to a president who has faulted NATO as “obsolete,” accused many members of being defense free-riders, and during the meeting declined to promise unconditionally that the United States would help militarily any alliance member that came under armed attack.

Actually, the survey once again shows that polls on foreign policy issues tend to be among the most incompetently and misleadingly crafted polls of all. I say this because the Pew researchers failed to raise in any of their questions any of the most important issues Americans need to think about as they assess the value of NATO. Maybe the best way to make the point is to present question possibilities that would make these issues clear.

First: Would you favor the United States militarily defending a NATO ally if embroiled in an armed conflict with Russia if this aid might result in a Russian nuclear attack on the United States?

Second, Would you favor the United States militarily defending a NATO ally if embroiled in an armed conflict with Russia, and running that risk of nuclear war, if the ally in question had never been considered by any U.S. president going back to Franklin D. Roosevelt to be a vital or even significant security interest of the United States?

Third, Would you favor the United States militarily defending a NATO ally if embroiled in an armed conflict with Russia, and running that risk of nuclear war, if the nuclear war risk existed largely because NATO’s European members collectively refuse to pay for militaries that could repel the Russians on their own?

In other words, a poll that measured Americans’ true beliefs about and support for NATO would be one that reminded them that, as with most of what’s important about life, different positions and decisions have important potential downsides as well as important potential upsides. And until pollsters begin informing Americans about the real choices they face on important questions of both domestic and foreign policy, it will be painfully obvious that theirs is yet another portion of the chattering classes in desperate need of some adult thinking.