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.

Following Up: Why the U.S. Still Faces a (South) Korea Problem

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Asia, China, comfort women, Following Up, free-riding, Japan, Kim Jong Un, missile defense, Moon Jae-in, North Korea, nuclear weapons, South Korea, THAAD, Trump

Three days into his presidency, new South Korean leader Moon Jae-In seems determined to prove me wrong in warning that his election could further undermine an American grand strategy toward Asia, and North Korea in particular, that’s already in big trouble.

As I’ve written repeatedly on RealityChek, well before South Korea’s snap presidential election this past Tuesday, the nuclear umbrella extended by Washington for decades over the South and Japan had started creating an unacceptable risk of nuclear attack on the American homeland. The reason: Chinese and North Korean nuclear forces were rapidly becoming able to survive even an attack by America’s own strategic warheads and retaliate by striking the United States.

Moon’s victory seemed bound to make the American position in the region even less tenable by placing in power in Seoul an opponent of the U.S. decision to de-nuclearize the North through a combination of military threats and economic pressure.

So even recognizing that politicians don’t always govern like they campaign, I’ve been surprised to read about several instances in recent days of Moon staying on the reservation. To be sure, President Trump lent a helping hand, making the first call by a foreign head of state to congratulate Moon on his win and inviting him to the United States for an official visit. For his part, Moon declared that “The U.S.-South Korea alliance is the foundation of our foreign policy, and will continue to be so.”

But independent of this conversation came some Moon moves apparently aimed at calming fears of a major rift with the United States. Even before speaking with Mr. Trump, Moon declined explicitly to blame him for the recent escalation of tensions on the Korean peninsula, preferring to describe his predecessor in Seoul’s Blue House as the main culprit. The new president also passed up a chance to demand an apology from the United States for supporting a bloody South Korean crackdown on dissidents in the city of Gwangju in 1980 – a distinct sore point with many Koreans today.

Perhaps most strikingly, right after North Korea unleashed a strident criticism of a new U.S.-supplied missile defense system in the South that’s viewed by Moon and many of his compatriots with major reservations, a Moon spokesperson stated that the new president had told China that resolving this controversy depended on the North refraining from further “provocation.”

All the same, Washington should still remain worried about Moon and South Korea going rogue. According to Stanford University Korea specialist Daniel Sneider, Moon hasn’t closed the door completely on reopening the issue of the missile system (known as THAAD) – which is partly aimed at protecting American military forces helping to defend South Korea from North Korean attack. More seriously, Sneider writes, Moon is contemplating building alongside THAAD “an indigenous Korean Air and Missile Defense system, which would not be linked to the U.S. and Japanese missile defense architecture….”

That possibility surely would be unacceptable to the United States, as it would at the least complicate the cooperation between the U.S. and South Korean militaries that would be vital in order to defeat the North in a conflict. Even more stunning, says Sneider, Moon favors creating “a preemptive-strike system armed with South Korean ballistic missiles” – a total nonstarter with Americans, as it would make the security of U.S. forces, and by extension that of the American homeland, dangerously dependent on the decisions of a foreign government.

Nevertheless, a greater role for South Korea in dealings with the volatile and unpredictable North is a centerpiece of Moon’s platform. His objective of enabling his country to “take the initiative” on this front is entirely understandable, given its location right next door to the dictator Kim Jong Un’s fearsome arsenal of nuclear and conventional arms. Moon has also tried to reassure Washington that he would never “approach or unilaterally open talks with North Korea without fully consulting the U.S. beforehand.” Yet it’s all too easy to foresee serious disputes opening up between the two governments over when diplomacy has or hasn’t reached an impasse.

Moon’s aim of raising South Korea’s diplomatic profile also could clash with the Trump administration’s plan to rely heavily on economic muscle flexing by China, by far the North’s leading trade partner, to weaken Pyongyang’s capacity to defy its neighbors demands. On the one hand, he fears that this approach could produce an outcome to the nuclear crisis that neglects South Korean interests. On the other, however, it’s inconsistent with his more fundamental views on the economic dimensions of North Korea diplomacy.

For the United States has long hoped that potent enough sanctions would help force Pyongyang into negotiating an end to its nuclear program, and the Trump administration has ratcheted up military threats as well. In fact, sanctions on North Korea have repeatedly been approved by the entire international community. Moon has said he recognizes the need for continued sanctions of some kind, but was a top aide to one of the South Korean presidents of the 1990s who pursued a so-called “Sunshine Policy” of economic engagement with the North. Not surprisingly, he’s spoken much more often about promoting North Korean reform by expanding his country’s trade with and investment in his Stalinist neighbor than about the role of economic clamps.

Finally, the United States has struggled to shore up the anti-North Korea front by persuading South Korea and Japan to overcome deep and historic animosities and cooperate more extensively in security affairs. But in this respect, Moon has been quite the hard-liner. Specifically, he has opposed even the limited intelligence sharing with Tokyo begun by his predecessor out of unhappiness with the 2015 bilateral agreement to resolve a dispute triggered by Japan’s colonial and wartime practices of forcing Korean women to serve Japanese soldiers and officials as prostitutes (who were euphemistically called “comfort women).

The point here is not to criticize (or praise) Moon’s positions or priorities. As I emphasized in this post’s forerunner, there are any number of reasons for taking South Koreans’ views in general on North Korea with the utmost seriousness. After all, they live right next door. If mistakes are made in handling the North, they’ll suffer the worst consequences by far.

But if Moon, their new leader, is wrong, Americans would suffer fearsome consequences, too – including a retaliatory nuclear strike that could destroy one or more American cities. Even worse, this catastrophe could well stem from South Korea’s failure to spend adequately on its own defense, and consequent heavy reliance on the U.S. commitment – even though it lives in one of the most dangerous regions on earth, and even though it’s exponentially wealthier than the North. And of course, because the United State doesn’t live right next door, or even close, the upside to its own security of its current Korea and broader Asia strategy pales by comparison.

Which is why even had South Koreans chosen a more traditional leader, I would still so strongly favor letting them – and leaders and citizens of even wealthier Japan and other nearby countries – realize Moon-like ambitions, take control of their own destinies, and handle North Korea and other possible threats however they see fit.

But since it’s completely unreasonable – at best – to expect Americans to pay for the Asians’ mistakes if they’re wrong, and war breaks out anyway, Washington should withdraw these forces well before the locals take charge. The end of American military involvement would bring the added and immense benefit of removing the threat of a North Korean nuclear strike – because the United States wouldn’t be taking any actions that would fuel North Korean ire and trigger retaliation.

It’s a clear case of power creating responsibility. Especially if Moon wants more of the former for South Korea, he’ll have to accept more of the latter – for its own security. And if he’s not willing to step up, Washington should make the decision for him. 

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: South Korea’s Elections are Likely to Make America’s Asia Strategy Even Loonier

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allies, Asia, deterrence, East Asia-Pacific, free-riding, Kim Jong Un, Moon Jae-in, North Korea, Northeast Asia, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, South Korea, Tim Shorrock

This coming Tuesday will not only see a new presidential election in South Korea. It may also mark the day when a second big wheel flies off of America’s grand strategy in the Asia-Pacific region, and in particular off its approach to addressing the North Korea nuclear weapons threat.

For now on top of the United States’ loss of escalation dominance on the Korean peninsula – which I’ve written about for more than two years and which has needlessly exposed the American homeland to the risk of nuclear attack – the U.S. ally supposedly facing the greatest threat from Kim Jong Un’s heavily armed dictatorship could wind up defecting from the anti-Pyongyang coalition. It would be hard to concoct a scenario that would be less defensible strategically and politically, and more utterly absurd.

Of course, the results of the South Korea election haven’t yet come in. The front-runner, veteran left-of-center politician Moon Jae-in, is by no means anti-American. And as with so many politicians, he may govern very differently from how he’s campaigned. But as made clear by coverage of South Korean politics by my good friend Tim Shorrock – who has written on the country for decades – Moon believes that the United States and North Korea’s neighbors need to start putting much more emphasis on reopening negotiations with the North and much less on threats of military action or more effective economic sanctions. At least as important, many of his compatriots clearly agree.

Moon and his supporters could well be right – if only because they’ve been so close to the situation on the peninsula for so long. (Tim strongly believes this to be the case.) Nevertheless, they could be wrong as well. After all, their very proximity to the North might be denying them valuable perspective. Their views may be influenced too strongly by shared ethnicity. And they may, like classic free-riders, be assuming that the American nuclear umbrella will ultimately bail out the South if they’re wrong.

But although the merits of the Moon case are uncertain, the implications for the United States are anything but. If South Korea’s “doves” are right, a more durable peace could indeed be created in Korea (meaning, specifically, that the Korean War would finally come to an official end more than 60 years after an armistice halted the fighting in 1953). As a result, Northeast Asia, one of the world’s major economic dynamos, would be stabilized. And the prospect of the United States being drawn into a nuclear war with North Korea would be greatly diminished.

But it can’t be forgotten that the (mounting) nuclear risks posed by North Korea to the United States stem entirely from the American commitment to defend South Korea – and more specifically, it stems from the longstanding U.S. decision to try to deter a North Korean invasion of the South by stationing nearly 30,000 troops right at the Demilitarized Zone. They couldn’t possibly halt the North’s conventional forces, but their deaths would almost surely provoke an American nuclear strike on the North. This prospect that has certainly helped keep Pyongyang at bay – which was arguably an acceptable risk to run when Pyongyang lacked any means to hit back at American territory. But soon, pursuing this strategy could result in the North successfully launching a nuclear missile at an American city – or two or three.

Even worse from an American standpoint, a prime reason that the South relies on the U.S. nuclear umbrella for its defense is its failure to field adequate conventional forces itself. Despite living right next door to one of the world’s most heavily armed and unpredictable countries, South Korea only spends 2.7 percent of its entire economy on its armed forces. By comparison, the United States – which has no neighbors that are either powerful or hostile, let alone both – spends 4.3 percent.

All of which means that if the South Korea doves are wrong, the American people could pay a fearful price largely because one of the world’s leading economic powers has chosen to skimp on its military, and because its (new) leaders insisted on a diplomacy-first policy that gave Pyongyang yet more time to strengthen its nuclear forces. That’s a heckuva downside. And let’s not forget the chaos that would result from the United States and South Korea splitting in public and pursuing two dramatically different policies toward the North.

Supporters of the strategic status quo in East Asia are right – America’s longstanding policies have brought impressive benefits. But they’re wrong in insisting that the benefits for the United States have even remotely approached those for the East Asians themselves, including South Korea. And the emergence of a credible North Korean nuclear threat to the American homeland has skewed the relationship of costs and benefits much further against the United States.

I can’t think of a more unacceptable situation from America’s vantage point. Even before these South Korean political trends had become so prominent, it was clear to me that the best strategy for the American people was to recognize the North Korean challenge as the responsibility of North Korea’s (very wealthy and powerful) neighbors, and to withdraw the U.S. forces whose presence is bound increasingly to endanger the security of the United States itself.

The election of a South Korean dove would turn current U.S. strategy positively looney and even more dangerous to Americans – clashing strongly with the stated views of the presumed chief beneficiary’s new leader, and less able than ever to turn up the screws on the North.

I hope instead it causes America’s ossified bipartisan foreign policy establishment to realize finally that Washington can’t be placed in a position ostensibly of caring about South Korea’s security more than the South Koreans, and that if their new leaders disagree with U.S. priorities, that’s their sovereign right. By the same token, this ally can’t expect to have its cake and eat it, too. Bottom line? President Trump should let President-to-be Moon and his backers know that if they want to engage with North Korea, they feel free to give it a whirl – and that in the true spirit of an America First diplomacy, the United States will be wishing them the very best from safely on the sidelines.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: What Obama Gets Right and Wrong About America’s Allies

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alliances, allies, Asia, Bret Stephens, burden sharing, Cato Institute, David Cameron, David Ignatius, deterrence, Eli Lake, Europe, foreign policy establishment, France, free-riding, geography, Japan, Jeffrey Goldberg, Korea, LIbya, Middle East, Nikolas Sarkozy, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Saudi Arabia, self-sufficiency, The Atlantic, United Kingdom, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post

As I said over the weekend, that Atlantic article on President Obama’s foreign policy based on a series of lengthy interviews is an unusually rich vein of material. So let’s keep mining! Since its most newsworthy aspects so far have been judged to be Mr. Obama’s views on America’s allies, let’s focus on them.

The quick and dirty: The bipartisan foreign policy establishment (including its journalistic wing) is just aghast that the president has derided many of the nation’s main treaty and less formal allies – including the United Kingdom – as “free riders.” And on this matter, Obama could not be more on target. At the same time, just as with his pessimism on the Middle East, he hasn’t even begun to follow up policy-wise in ways that are not only logical, but vital for avoiding major future troubles.

As the article by Jeffrey Goldberg reminds, the president has dressed down London for skimping on defense spending while the United States has borne an outsized share of the Western security burden. The British responded by – minimally – meeting a spending goal long endorsed by Washington, but Mr. Obama still complained bitterly about the history of many allies’ “holding our coats while we did all the fighting.’”

Indeed, he largely blamed his failed intervention in Libya on “Europe and a number of Gulf countries who despise Qaddafi, or are concerned on a humanitarian basis, who are calling for action. But what has been a habit over the last several decades in these circumstances is people pushing us to act but then showing an unwillingness to put any skin in the game.” And he fingered both current British Prime Minister David Cameron and his then French counterpart, Nikolas Sarkozy, by name.

Also harshly criticized by the president: Saudi Arabia and other arch-conservative Persian Gulf monarchies, which he has accused of “intensifying” (Goldberg’s language) the outburst of “Muslim fury” seen in recent years by “heavily” funding the spread of Islamic fundamentalism.

Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens spoke for many in the nation’s professional foreign policy community when he wrote that Mr. Obama’s remarks to Goldberg “are so gratuitously damaging to long-standing U.S. alliances, international security and Mr. Obama’s reputation as a serious steward of the American interest that the words could not possibly have sprung from the lips of the president himself.”

But as shown by this essay by the Washington Post‘s David Ignatius, criticism has hardly been confined to neoconservatives. Indeed, Bloomberg View columnist Eli Lake delivered probably the ultimate slap at this facet of the “Obama Doctrine” – at least in the eyes of the nation’s chattering classes. He called it Trump-like.

The president certainly can be faulted for indiscretion while still serving in office. As Ignatius notes, candor can indeed be destabilizing. But such judgment questions aside what’s most important to know is that the president is unquestionably right on the merits. Unless you doubt that the Gulf Arab monarchies are funding the spread of one of Islam’s harshest, most medieval strains? Or believe that America’s allies in Europe and Japan have ever shouldered a remotely appropriate share of the load for what is after all their own defense?

As documented in this 2000 journal article of mine, since early in the Cold War, American administrations have struggled to convince or pressure leaders in London, Paris, Bonn (and then Berlin), and Tokyo alike to increase their military budgets both in absolute terms and as a percentage of overall alliance defense spending. All of these efforts have failed, even though Washington consistently used the most indulgent, and least sensible, criterion for success imaginable – raising allied spending to equal U.S. efforts.

If national security policy was a game, such an outcome would of course be “fair.” But when it comes to promoting and defending American interests, this approach has created a false equivalence in stakes, and led the United States to expend greater-than-necessary amounts on the military, and face greater-than-necessary risks. For however important America’s interests in securing Europe or Japan and the rest of East Asia from Soviet, Russian, and Chinese threats, the allies’ interests in defending themselves are infinitely more important – and indeed, vital.

But U.S. burden-sharing efforts also failed for the same reason that has frustrated President Obama’s own ambitions: a stubborn unwillingness to recognize the inescapable dynamics of free-riding. For just like his Cold War and post-Cold War predecessors, Mr. Obama has continually sabotaged his burden-sharing strategies by endlessly declaring not only that allies and their regions are vital American security interests, but that their security and America’s are indivisible. So naturally, allies for decades have concluded that they have no need for much military exertion given Washington’s conviction that their downfall would be completely unacceptable. Ditto for coalition warfare in third countries, like Libya. Whether for moral or strategic reasons, the Obama administration never indicated that it could take the situation or leave it. So countries like the United Kingdom and France understandably – and entirely predictably – chose to take the easy way out.

The bad news – not for the nation as a whole, but for the often grandiose ambitions of its leaders – is that without reliable allies, many of their foreign policy objectives do, as they fear, become impossible to achieve. So just to pick through President Obama’s remarks to Goldberg, say goodbye (at least often) to “establishing norms that benefit everyone, and even to “doing good at a bearable cost,” to “promoting values, like democracy and human rights,” to “making the world a better place,” to “bending the world toward justice,” and especially to “leading the world.”

The good news – not for America’s professional foreign policy community, nearly the whole of which believes deeply in the urgency of these goals, but for the nation as a whole – is that neither U.S. security nor prosperity requires achieving any of them. As I’ve explained repeatedly, America is geopolitically secure enough and economically self sufficient enough to achieve adequate levels of security and prosperity even in a badly failing world.

Better yet, both this security and prosperity can be further enhanced without more overseas engagement.  And even if strengthening the U.S. capacity for self-reliance in all dimensions wasn’t eminently feasible, assigning it a much higher priority would be essential precisely because America’s allies have proven themselves so utterly feckless for so many decades.

Moreover, there’s an even more compelling argument for disengaging from America’s current security commitments and pursuing a more independent course than recognizing their major limits as multipliers for American power. In this increasingly dangerous, unstable world, these ties are entirely too likely to embroil the United States in conflicts it’s better off avoiding. As analysts at the Cato Institute in particular have warned, when their deterrence power fails, they tend to become “transmission belts of war.”

And these belts remain in place throughout the world – albeit on scales smaller than during the Cold War. On the one hand, it’s true that international tensions in places like Europe and much of Asia are considerably lower than between 1945 and 1990 (with the Korean peninsula a notable exception). On the other hand, the threat to the United States from an ideologically hostile superpower with global ambitions is greatly reduced as well.

Fortunately for President Obama and the nation, the United States hasn’t yet been trapped into defending alliances and regions that, however important, don’t justify exposing the American homeland to the risk of major war. But because for all his frustrations with the allies, he hasn’t thought through the consequences of clinging to these outmoded arrangements, his successor is less likely to be so lucky.

 

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Send in the Clowns

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2016 election, alliances, Bernie Sanders, China, Cold War, Donald Trump, economics, foreign policy establishment, free-riding, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Iraq war, ISIS, Middle East, NATO, neoconservatives, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Republicans, Russia, special interests, think tanks, Trade

You don’t need to have any regard for Donald Trump to appreciate the black humor of Washington’s Republican foreign policy establishment (or at least lots of it) launching a campaign to brand him an incompetent and a menace in international affairs.

Last Wednesday, about 100 “GOP national security leaders” released a letter they signed stating their “core objections” to the possibility that the Republican front-runner will win the White House. The first reaction that any reasonable person should have is “If these are the leaders, who are the followers?” I worked professionally in the foreign policy field for decades and still keep up with it actively. And many of the signatories are completely unknown even to me. Apparently even a glorified briefcase carrier for a fourth-level political appointee in George W. Bush’s administration qualifies.

The second reaction is much more obvious: Many come from the Republican party’s neoconservative wing. Based on its record, their credibility has fallen how deeply into the toilet? Nor is this question based solely on the second Iraq war. After all, I personally favored the effort to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and still believe that the invasion was justified – though of course the occupation was a (largely foreseeable disaster). But these ostensible experts and intellectuals have failed on numerous other major grounds as well.

As made clear by their indictment of Trump, their ranks include champions of the laudable but transparently looney idea that the United States can and should spend considerable amounts of time and effort spreading democracy to and engaging in nation-building in regions and countries (like Iraq) that have no tradition of accountable government and no experience with un-coerced cohesion. More recently, they’ve propounded the equally nutty notion that Middle Eastern countries can be turned into an effective anti-ISIS force that will handle most of the ground fighting to boot.

They’ve long supported U.S. trade and international economic policies whose effects have included enriching increasingly belligerent China and showering it with advanced, defense-related technologies. For nearly as long they’ve favored the expansion of the NATO alliance right up to Russia proper’s borders – which can’t have helped improve relations between Washington and Moscow over the last decade. In fact, even decades after the Cold War ended, they have remained tightly wed to U.S. defense commitments to flagrantly free-riding allies – which also often rip off Americans shamelessly on trade and other fronts. In fact, they have never displayed the slightest genuine inkling that domestic economic strength is the key to any successful American foreign policy strategy, however interventionist or restrained.

But there are two more fundamental problems with these figures, along with the non-neocons among them, that have translated directly into weaknesses and blunders that have plagued American diplomacy since the early post-World War II years. And please keep in mind: Many of these conclusions come straight from my first-hand experience working closely with these folks during my four-year stint as Associate Editor of FOREIGN POLICY magazine.

First, unlike the original Cold War U.S. foreign policymakers – who were certainly not beyond legitimate criticism – most of the current crowd lacks any meaningful experience in the private sector. Its members have never built or even run viable businesses, or invented anything worthwhile. As a result, they have never been judged by standards like successes that create tangible, enduring rewards and widespread benefits, or failures that exact painful, lasting costs.

Instead, most have brought themselves to the attention of decision-makers by rising through the ranks of academe or, worse, its ersatz Washington version – the think tank world. And the skills needed to stand out in these realms – turning a neat phrase or fashioning a catchy soundbite, identifying and courting prospective patrons, manipulating an all-too-gullible national media, and perhaps most important, creatively regurgitating stale dogma that promotes special interests – have nothing to do with keeping the nation as a whole secure and prosperous. They’re entirely about personal advancement in what I’ve called a Washington culture that coddles failure.

In other words, these figures are overwhelmingly foreign policy careerists. And since their working experiences as a rule have been so tightly confined to the bubble worlds of the Beltway or college campuses, they have almost never needed to encounter the obstacles continually erected by stubborn reality to the best laid plans of mice and men. Which is why they typically lack the wisdom and judgment best guaranteed to navigate them.

Not surprisingly, then, these 20^th and 21^st century version of renaissance courtiers deserve credit for no meaningful achievements whatever. Indeed, the degree of safety and prosperity that the nation has enjoyed during their tenures has been due almost entirely to the wealth and power it has amassed over the centuries, along with the inherent security created by favorable geography. If today’s foreign policy establishment can be said to have accomplished anything, it’s taking practically any opportunity available to squander the nation’s built-in advantages.

Not that I want to leave readers with the impression that out-of-control careerism is confined to the Republican wing of the foreign policy establishment. Its Democratic wing has been at least as unimpressive. And you can be sure you’ll be hearing from it if Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders starts posing a greater threat to Hillary Clinton’s presidential hopes.

Following Up: On the Middle East, the “Serious” Candidates are Less Serious Than Ever

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2016 elections, air strikes, allies, burden sharing, coalition, Defense Department, Following Up, free-riding, Iran, Iraq, ISIS, Kurds, Middle East, Pentagon, Saudi Arabia, Sunnis, Syria, terrorism

A recent RealityChek post explained why the label “serious” shouldn’t be used for presidential candidates (in either party) who claim that the United States can create a meaningful anti-ISIS military coalition. More recently, a report from the Pentagon itself further mocks the idea that office-seekers – or anyone else – believing that America’s allies will share much of the burden of defeating the terrorist group have any significant knowledge of the Middle East or world affairs generally. As my post noted, most of the presidential hopefuls in both parties fall into this category – including all of the “mainstream” or “establishment” figures, along with President Obama .

The Defense Department report tallied by country the number of air strikes carried out against ISIS as of January 19, and here are the findings. Overall, of the 9,782 such attacks conducted on targets in Syria and Iraq, the United States has been responsible for 7,551, or more than 77 percent. By target countries, U.S. war planes have carried out nearly 69 percent of the anti-ISIS strikes in Iraq, and just under 94 percent of these operations in Syria. (These counts don’t include Russian activity, or the more than 65,000 “sorties in support of operations” in the two countries, like reconnaissance and targeting missions.)

DoD doesn’t break down the non-U.S. figures by country; according to CNN, one reason is that these various governments define and count “air strike” in many different ways. But given the focus in the United States on local Middle East countries, and the expectation that their own gut level self-interest in will motivate them to practically lead the fight against a group they say is a literally mortal threat, it seems reasonable to surmise that Saudi Arabia et al are dropping the ball.

It’s important to point out that one reason that the United States has dominated the air war against ISIS is that the United States is the world’s dominant military power. At the same time, the U.S. air power is deployed all around the world in order to handle threats in nearly every region. America’s Middle East allies have no military responsibilities beyond their neighborhood.

Moreover, if these countries aren’t all-in for the air war, how realistic is it to expect them to charge into a major ground war against ISIS? The answer: It’s the height of inanity – and ignorance. And the reason is pretty simple: As has repeatedly been the case since the end of World War II, the United States needlessly has made itself vulnerable to the free-rider phenomenon. Under Democratic and Republican presidents alike, Washington has been so infatuated with exercising “global leadership,” and has so loudly advertised its conclusion that America’s own security depends on the security of every corner of the globe, that its European NATO allies, Japan, and South Korea have understandably assumed that the United States would protect them no matter how modest their own efforts.

In the impossibly byzantine Middle East, the free-rider syndrome has been exacerbated by all the other items on the security agendas of countries ranging from Saudi Arabia (like countering Iranian ambitions in the region, and supporting lots of Islamic radicalism itself) to Turkey (like preventing Iraq’s anti-ISIS Kurds from becoming strong enough to create an independent state that would attract Turkey’s own Kurdish minority).

The failure of the “serious” presidential candidates to recognize the coalition delusion shows that accumulating “experience” in making national security policy in Washington by no means proves that they’ve accumulated wisdom or even developed simple common sense. The same of course holds for the establishment media, which keeps clinging to and parroting the same off-the-mark convictions.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: How to Stop China’s Maritime Expansionism

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12-mile limit, allies, Asia, asymmetric warfare, China, cyber-security, cyber-war, export-led growth, forced technology transfer, free-riding, freedom of navigation, hacking, international law, multinational companies, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, South China Sea, territorial waters, Trade, trade barriers, U.S. Navy

It’s too early to say that President Obama’s decision to use the U.S. Navy to challenge China’s expansionism in the South China Sea shows he’s grown a backbone. But maybe a vertebra or two? At the same time, it’s clear that this story is far from ended, that there may be less than meets the eye to Beijing’s apparent acquiescence in the administration’s clear dissing of Chinese unilateral claims to East Asian waters, and that the United States needs to explore new types of responses if it wants to maintain its leading position in the Asia Pacific region.

To recap, in recent years, China has put muscle behind its long-stated insistence that many of the seas to its east and south, along with various tiny islands and island chains, are Chinese territory. As with similar longstanding claims made by other Asian countries ranging from Japan and South Korea to the Philippines and Vietnam, these positions aren’t recognized by international law.

For literally decades, all of these countries generally agreed to disagree (despite testing each others’ resolve from time to time).  Yet nearly two years ago, China began upping the ante by creating large physical presences on some of the (mainly uninhabited) islands in the South China Sea, and then by literally enlarging some of the smallest ones (which are so tiny that they literally sink below the waves on a regular basis), and creating new ones through various land reclamation techniques. (Other countries have made similar efforts, but they’ve been much smaller and far more sporadic.) China has also claimed exclusive air rights over many of the disputed regions.

In addition, China has unilaterally declared sovereignty over the waters surrounding all these locations out to 12 miles – the normal allowed by international law, but a standard that doesn’t always apply to the kinds of artificial creations produced by China. Moreover, Beijing went even further, stating that foreign naval vessels needed to notify Chinese authorities whenever they wanted to enter such waters.

This decision apparently convinced Washington that China’s actions unacceptably threatened freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. That’s a huge deal, since trillions of dollars worth of U.S. and other international commerce sail through these waters annually, and since they’re rich in natural resources as well. And incidentally, all other regional powers seem to agree.

So the president finally authorized an American guided missile destroyer to sail close enough to one of the disputed islets to violate Chinese claims – and without asking permission. The administration has also made clear that the kind of mission carried out by the U.S.S. Lassen would be repeated frequently. Even better would be participation by regional allies, whose historic specialty so far has been free-riding on American defense guarantees.  But except for Japan, they don’t seem to be even actively considering such assistance, and the United States bizarrely hasn’t even officially sought it.

China has protested strongly, but don’t dismiss it as a paper tiger just yet. Despite America’s continuing military edge in East Asia, Beijing is hardly devoid of options. For instance, China could create significant military presences on some of the islands. In addition, and more worrisome, according to a tweet from China-watcher Patrick Chovanec, Beijing could escalate its cyber-attacks on American businesses and government agencies.

The United States would be hard-pressed to respond in kind, as I’ve noted, because it lacks clear-cut (and perhaps any) cyber-war superiority, and because such hacking could be much more damaging to America’s more advanced economy and society than to China’s.  And in fact, capitalizing on such disparities would be fully consistent with the notion of waging “asymmetric war” developed by Chinese strategists. 

A much better means of retaliation would be economic. China’s economy, which depends heavily on exporting, and especially to the United States, is slowing. And that growth threatens Communist Party rule because it’s hold on power has for decades depended heavily on its success in boosting living standards throughout Chinese society.

Of course, erecting major barriers to Chinese imports would be condemned, especially by offshoring interests, as shortsighted and even dangerous protectionism that could plunge the two countries, and the larger world, into a “trade war.” But as always, such warnings ignore the long-term net damage inflicted on the U.S. economy – and especially its invaluable productive sectors – by the huge expansion of bilateral commerce since the early 1990s.

They also ignore the clear message being sent by the persistence of the American recovery (however inadequate) in the face of a weakening global economy, and by the reemergence once that recovery began of overall U.S. trade deficits (including of course with China) as major drags on American growth: The United States needs the rest of the world economy even less than ever, and certainly much less than trade-dependent countries like China need the United States.

Would wielding this kind of economic stick against China be cost-free for Americans? Of course not, especially in the short- and even medium-term, before supply chains got restructured. Yet tariffs and other curbs could always be phased in. Nor need they cover all Chinese products (although the more, the merrier). And other means of economic retaliation could be employed as well. How about cutting off all or at least some of the defense-related technology and capital that U.S. multinational companies are still recklessly transferring to China, either voluntarily or under threat of being shut out of the Chinese market?

More important, whatever the resulting costs, they look a lot less intimidating than those that could result from even a brief military conflict (which logically would trigger even greater and costlier economic adjustments), or from massive Chinese cyber-attacks. And don’t forget the flip side of passivity: An America that failed to use its biggest advantage over China for fear of experiencing any pain at all inevitably would be an America that flashed a big, fat green light to Beijing’s expansionists.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Time for U.S. to Use Its Trade as Well as Financial Clout

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finance, Financial Crisis, free-riding, Global Imbalances, sanctions, Trade, {What's Left of) Our Economy

The headline on yesterday’s Reuters article said it all: “Bruised and grumbling, foreign banks bend to U.S. rules.”

As the news agency reported, foreign banks are increasingly angry about the U.S. government exercising its territorial reach and enforcing its banking laws against certain of their dealings outside U.S. territory – namely, the business they do with rogue states like Iran and Sudan, and with communist Cuba, in violation of various U.S. embargos and sanctions.

Washington’s policies are “imperialistic,” these European and Asian finance firms are charging. In the words of one outraged British banker, “You … Americans! Who are you to tell us, the rest of the world, that we’re not going to deal with Iranians?” Foreign governments have joined the chorus as well, with France’s finance minister openly calling in response for an end to the U.S. dollar-denominated system of paying for international transactions.

Let’s leave aside the morally disgusting free-riding attitudes revealed by these complaints. Like British and French banks, and their entire national economies, would be better off in world in which Iran’s theocrats could access all the financing they wanted to build nuclear weapons and finance terrorism? Of course not – and surely the banks – and especially the French government – realize this. The latter in particular simply seems to be counting on the United States to keep footing most of the resulting global security bill.

Let’s focus instead on the actual deeds of these furious banks so far. And guess what? For all their expressed indignation, they realize they have no choice. According to Reuters, “major lenders in Europe and Asia are reacting to the steady flow of punishments from the United States by doing ever more to comply with U.S. laws and by cutting business ties in countries Washington dislikes….” Plenty of examples are provided.

The reason? There’s simply no substitute available now for the dollar’s global role, and for all the reported desire to end the reign of King Dollar, none are remotely in sight.

Now it’s time for Washington to recognize and start using its clout to press another worthy cause – rebalancing today’s increasingly lopsided world trade and financial flows and thus reducing the odds that these bubble-inflating imbalances will help trigger a repeat of the last financial crisis.

No one can reasonably doubt that the clout is abundant. As shown in the World Trade Organization’s newest (2013) annual survey of global trade, U.S. imports adjusted for inflation are once again rising faster than the real U.S. economy – just as before the crisis. The entire world’s real imports, however, are now (as of 2012) rising faster than its inflation-adjusted economic output – and those global totals of course include the U.S. figures.

So obviously, accessing the American market remains vital for its trade competitors, and its importance doubtless has only grown since then, as even historically weak U.S. growth has proceeded faster than that of Europe and Japan, and the gap with China and other so-called emerging markets is narrowing, too. Even better, the U.S. economy retains subtantial potential to substitute domestic for imported goods and services without losing much long-term efficiency.

Yet when it comes to trade diplomacy, Washington still shies away from the kinds of unilateralism that is so succeeding so inarguably in finance diplomacy. It’s tempting to blame this unwarranted timidity on the lobbying of offshoring-happy multinational corporations, which also need to access the U.S. market from all the factories they’ve sent overseas. But it’s not like Wall Street is shy about pressuring the executive branch and Congress, as made clear by the titanic efforts needed to pass middling financial reform legislation even in the crisis’ aftermath.

Trade policy timidity probably fundamentally stems from an official consensus holding that purposeful government intervention is legitimate when it comes to protecting the national security interests at stake in relations with rogue states, but not when it comes to safeguarding the economic interests at stake in trade relations.

It’s long past time to scrap this outdated mindset. The damage inflicted by the financial crisis, ensuing recession, and anemic recovery has been every bit as dangerous to America’s future as, say, an Iranian nuke or even a repeat of 9-11. Forgetting the close relationship between national security and national prosperity can only ensure that America enjoys neither. And its too-often-feckless allies won’t escape the consequences, either.