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

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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: On That Trump Inaugural Address

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American First, foreign policy, geopolitics, Immigration, inaugural address, inauguration, internationalism, John F. Kennedy, national interests, national security, Trade, Trump

Wow! That was some inauguration address from President Trump! We’ve literally never heard anything like it either from an incoming president or a new president or a long-sitting president or a former president. In fact, it is so no-less-than revolutionary that I almost hesitate to comment so soon.

But this is the blogosphere, so here’s the biggest takeaway I see so far: If Mr. Trump is as serious as he sounded about taking an “America First” approach to U.S. foreign policy, and trade and other international economic policies, he will not only turn the country upside down. He will turn the world upside down.

The main reasons are that literally since the Pearl Harbor attack, American leaders have defined this concept out of existence. That is, they have not believed that America’s interests can be separated in any meaningful and especially ongoing way from those of the rest of the world and its well-being. As I’ve written, this idea by no means reflects iron realities of America’s own situation, world politics, or America’s relations with other countries.

Instead, it springs from a distinctive ideology – best termed “internationalism” – that is as inherently subjective and imperfectly reflective of reality as any other ideology. And it’s fundamental assumption is that because the United States can’t be adequately secure or free or prosperous unless the rest of the world has achieved the same goals, the nation should assume whatever risks and expenses are necessary at least to generate progress regardless of the impact on America’s own circumstances. If you doubt this, recall (or take a look at) President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than half a century ago.

The way I see it, Kennedy’s ringing rhetoric about America’s supposedly infinite resolve and ability to defend freedom – especially in its Cold War context – pushed the United States much faster toward disaster in Vietnam, and produced similar fiascoes for decades afterwards. It’s also led Democratic and Republican presidents alike to sacrifice big and highly productive chunks of America’s domestic economy (notably manufacturing) on behalf of liberalizing global trade, fostering third world economic development, and buying and keeping allies.

So I’ve long argued for the imperative of a completely different grand strategy. It rejects as both delusional and dangerous – because unnecessary – the practice of indefinitely striving for a more stable and/or more secure world. And it concentrates on capitalizing on America’s considerable, matchless, and geographically and geologically based potential for more-than-adequate levels of security and prosperity. As a result, I’ve contended that any U.S. initiative in world affairs meet a strict, national interest test: It must strengthen or protect or enrich the United States in direct, concrete ways. And it must do so within a finite period.

This is essentially Trump’s stated approach – which internationalist critics on both the left and the right, at home and abroad, have denigrated as small-mindedly “transactional.” Of course, they also believe that it will destroy arrangements that have prevented great power war and global depression since 1945. My main point here is not repeating that the president and I are right and the naysayers are wrong, but to emphasize just how radical this possible change would be.

At the same time, I stuck “possible” into that previous sentence for good reasons. First, even if this is Mr. Trump’s plan, it’s not going to be put into effect right away. Barring existential crises, like major wars or the Great Depression or Watergate-like scandals, changes this big rarely take place quickly. Second, powerful forces remain aligned firmly against President Trump – in Big Business and on Wall Street, in the two major parties, and in the mainstream media and the rest of the national chattering classes. Don’t think they’ll give in easily. Indeed, from their backgrounds, it’s quite possible that several members of the president’s cabinet and leading advisory circles could be opposed, too.

Third, because events so often call the tune, especially in national security, it’s entirely conceivable that a series of real or apparent crises will result in a Trump foreign policy that’s mainly reactive – and continues along the same strategic lines. And fourth, some of the president’s ongoing rhetoric itself – i.e., on exercising global leadership, or on escalating the war on ISIS in the Middle East, or especially on “reinforcing old alliances” (as promised in the inaugural address) – don’t mesh easily (to say the least) with the idea of America First.

More optimistically (from my standpoint), the chances of changing America’s course on trade and immigration issues sooner rather than later seem higher. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal, brought to you by former Presidents Bush (the 43d) and Obama, has now been scrapped. Mexico has announced that negotiations to transform the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and to deal with other bilateral issues, will start next week. Presidents also have impressive authority to impose various types of tariffs unilaterally, as well as to overhaul American approaches on other economic fronts – for example, on further curbing investments in the U.S. economy from China. And don’t forget how that Mr. Trump can repeal the controversial Obama executive orders on immigration with the stroke of a pen.

Finally, it’s important to note that any big change, even necessary big change, rarely comes without tumult. In addition, you can count on the mainstream media to exaggerate its severity whenever possible, as well as to blame Mr. Trump for much domestic and foreign turmoil even when he’s not remotely responsible. Even an alpha dog personality like the new president might find the visuals unnerving. I just hope that he remembers his own view that the alternative – allowing festering problems to become genuine calamities (including foreign military quagmires) – is likeliest to be far worse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And one main reason cited by the author?

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

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

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

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

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

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: An Empty Obama UN Farewell

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assimilation, education, geopolitics, global integration, globalization, international law, international norms, Islam, labor standards, Middle East, Muslims, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, radical Islam, reeducation, refugees, skills, sovereignty, TPP, Trade, trade enforcement, training, Trans-Pacific Partnership, UN, United Nations

National leaders’ speeches to each year’ UN General Assembly – even those by American presidents – are rarely more than meaningless boilerplate or cynical bloviating. But President Obama’s address to the organization yesterday – as with some of its predecessors – is worth examining in detail both because it was his last, and because Mr. Obama clearly views such occasions as opportunities to push U.S. and international public opinion in fundamentally new directions where they urgently need to head.

In yesterday’s case, the president saw his mission as justifying his belief that Americans in particular need to reject temptations to turn inward from the world’s troubles, and more completely embrace forces that inexorably are tightening international integration economically and even in term of national security.

To be fair to Mr. Obama, he sought to offer “broad strokes those areas where I believe we must do better together” rather than “a detailed policy blueprint.” But even given this caveat, what’s most striking is how many of the big, tough questions he (eloquently) dodges.

Here’s the president’s main premise and conclusion:

“…I believe that at this moment we all face a choice. We can choose to press forward with a better model of cooperation and integration. Or we can retreat into a world sharply divided, and ultimately in conflict, along age-old lines of nation and tribe and race and religion.

“I want to suggest to you today that we must go forward, and not backward. I believe that as imperfect as they are, the principles of open markets and accountable governance, of democracy and human rights and international law that we have forged remain the firmest foundation for human progress in this century.”

This passage makes clear that Mr. Obama doesn’t buy my thesis that the United States is geopolitically secure and economically self-sufficient enough in reality and potential to thrive however chaotic the rest of the world. Nor does he believe the converse – that the security and prosperity the nation has enjoyed throughout its history has first and foremost stemmed from its own location, and from its ability to capitalize on its inherent advantages and strengths, not from cooperating or integrating with the rest of the world.

The president’s contention that “the world is too small for us to simply be able to build a wall and prevent it from affecting our own societies” rings true for most countries – even assuming that he doesn’t really think that this stark choice is the only alternative to complete openness to global developments and commerce and populations and authority, however promising or threatening. But he seems oblivious to America’s “exceptionalism” geopolitically and economically.

Even if I’m wrong, however, and even accepting Mr. Obama’s “broad strokes” objectives, this lengthy presidential address gives national leaders and their citizens almost no useful insights on how countries can achieve his goals. Here are just two examples:

The president recognizes the need to make the global economy “work better for all people and not just for those at the top.” But given the trade deals he himself has sought, how can worker rights be strengthened “so they can organize into independent unions and earn a living wage”? The president insisted again that his Pacific Rim trade deal points the way. But as I’ve noted, the immense scale of factory complexes even in smallish third world countries like Vietnam makes the necessary outside monitoring and enforcement impossible.

Similarly, no one can argue with Mr. Obama’s recommendation to invest “in our people — their skills, their education, their capacity to take an idea and turn it into a business.” But as I documented more than a decade ago in my The Race to the Bottom, governments the world over, including in the very low-wage developing world, recognize the importance of improving their populations’ skill and education levels. In addition, multinational corporations can make workers productive even in these very low-income countries – and continue paying them peanuts compared with wages in more developed countries. Why should anyone expect his recommendation to give workers in America a leg up?

It’s easy to sympathize with the president’s call “to open our hearts and do more to help refugees who are desperate for a home.” Who in principle is opposed to aiding “men and women and children who, through no fault of their own, have had to flee everything that they know, everything that they love,…”?

But as Mr. Obama indirectly admitted, many of these refugees come from a part of the world where “religion leads us to persecute those of another faith…[to] jail or beat people who are gay…[and to] prevent girls from going to school….” He also described the Middle East as a place where too often the “public space” is narrowed “to the mosque.”

It was encouraging to see him recognize the legitimacy – though perhaps not the necessity – of insisting “that refugees who come to our countries have to do more to adapt to the customs and conventions of the communities that are now providing them a home.” But is he blithely assuming success? And it was less encouraging to see him ignore the excruciatingly difficult challenge of adequately vetting migrants from war-torn and chaotic countries.

Finally, on the political side of integration, the president seems to lack the courage of his convictions. For despite his high regard for international law, and support for America “giving up some freedom of action” and “binding ourselves to international rules,” he also specified that these were long-term objectives – presumably with little relevance in the here and now. Indeed, Mr. Obama also argued that, even way down the road, the United States wouldn’t be “giving up our ability to protect ourselves or pursue our core interests….”

So it sounds like he’d relegate even future international law-obeying to situations that really don’t matter. Which is fine. But how that gets us to a more secure world is anyone’s guess.

It’s true that Mr. Obama will be leaving office soon, and that his thoughts no longer matter critically. But at the same time, American leaders have been speaking in these lofty globalist terms for decades. If the president is indeed right about global integration and the future, what a shame that he didn’t make more progress in bringing these ideas down to earth.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: What You Really Need to Know About Brexit

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Brexit, Donald Trump, EU, European Union, geopolitics, globalization, Immigration, internationalism, Obama, regulation, self-sufficiency, sovereignty, Trade, United Kingdom, Walter Lippmann, {What's Left of) Our Economy

“Brexit” – the possibility that Thursday, the United Kingdom (UK) will vote to leave the European Union (EU) – deserves every bit of the exhaustive media coverage and commentary its received. Although there’s major (and understandable) disagreement over the economic and geopolitical impact of a “Leave” victory, there’s no doubt that the effects could be seismic on both fronts. Especially momentous would be a post-Brexit decision by other members of the floundering EU to follow suit, producing the breakup not only of the world’s biggest integrated market, but of a genuinely historic experiment in political integration and transnational governance.

I have no particular dog in this hunt – but strongly believe that the British have every right to decide whether to continue its EU membership, and that foreigners, and particularly foreign leaders, should tread carefully in offering their opinions. I’m also agnostic on the reverberations for Britain– in part because I haven’t studied the UK economy very closely.

Something I am sure of, however, is that contrary to much of the flood of Brexit-bred pontificating (notably from President Obama), Britain’s decision won’t hold important lessons for the United States either way. The reason: The UK’s economic and geopolitical situation is nothing like America’s.

This observation may sound obvious, but as I’ve written, since U.S. foreign policy’s (current) internationalist era began at the outset of World War II, American leaders and strategists practically across the board have justified non-stop, all-but-limitless global engagement by pointing to the nation’s acute exposure to all manner of threats and opportunities generated abroad. Their reasoning – which was articulated best by pundit, philosopher, and adviser to presidents Walter Lippmann – sprung from the belief that the United States was best seen as a big version of Britain.

That is, geographically it’s an island that floats in “an immense oceanic lake of which the other great powers control the shores” and therefore (my phrasing) enjoy “an unbeatable combination of geographic advantage, boast combined military potential far greater than America’s, and in an age of long-range air power, are located much closer [to the United States]” than Lippmann’s historically complacent countrymen realized.

I explained that Lippmann, and other internationalists, couldn’t be more off-base, because the United States and Britain couldn’t have less in common economically and geopolitically. Especially relevant to the Brexit debate and its implications for the United States, America boasts all the major resources and other assets needed for all the economic independence it genuinely needs – including a domestic market more than large enough to support production of the full range of goods and services at scales large enough to be profitable.

Conversely, Britain overwhelmingly lacks these advantages. This hardly means that leaving the EU is sure to be an economically foolhardy choice for the UK. In principle, the benefits of Brexit could exceed the costs of EU membership (like excessive pan-European regulations and Open Borders immigration policies). Britain could also boost its long-term productivity – and chances for greater prosperity – with a “Leave”-inspired burst of reform. But there can’t be any legitimate doubt that the UK is in a much weaker position than the United States to pursue such a go-it-alone strategy.

It’s also important to note that the British people could decide – as is their sovereign right – that restoring what they see as their pre-EU degree of political independence matters more than any conceivable economic risks they might run.

But the vote and whatever consequences it produces for Britain is not, as widely portrayed, a universal test of the pluses and minuses of free trade and the current version of globalization. As such, it should have no bearing on U.S. decisions on integrating more extensively with the global economy (as President Obama and the rest of the political and economic establishment seek), or starting to back away (as presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump seems to favor).

Clearly, the United States has longstanding historic and cultural ties with the UK, along with close economic and security relations. But the superior economic choices it faces are in a class by themselves – and they’ll remain so as long as Americans remember that their country isn’t Britain.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Former Military Bigwigs’ Militarily Dubious Case for New Trade Deals

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alliances, China, Cold War, deterrence, energy, export-led growth, free trade agreements, geopolitics, Germany, Japan, Korea, Middle East, NATO, oil, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, Soviet Union, technology transfer, TPP, Trade, Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, Trans-Pacific Partnership, tripwires, TTIP, Vladimir Putin

Despite my great respect for America’s uniformed military and for the civilians who try to manage the nation’s huge defense establishment, many of them have just reminded us that they have long suffered from a big, fat blind spot when it comes to U.S. foreign policy and its relationship to trade and economic policy.

Seventeen former Secretaries of Defense and leading generals on Thursday released a letter expressing their “strongest possible support” for President Obama’s proposed Pacific Rim trade deal and its trans-Atlantic counterpart. According to the signers, who included Colin Powell (a former Secretary of State to boot), and former Pentagon chiefs Leon Panetta, Chuck Hagel, Robert Gates, and Donald Rumsfeld, as well as former U.S. Iraq commander and CIA chief David Petraeus, “There are tremendous strategic benefits to [the two deals] and there would be harmful strategic consequences if we fail to secure these agreements. In both Asia-Pacific and the Atlantic, our allies and partners would question our commitments, doubt our resolve, and inevitably look to other partners. America’s prestige, influence, and leadership are on the line.” Needless to say, the letter claims that the economic benefits of these pacts would be “substantial,” too.

But its predictions of strategic disaster flowing from rejecting the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) stem from fundamental misunderstandings of how and why America’s main alliances are structured and work. More specifically, these former leaders either don’t or refuse to recognize that U.S. allies need the United States much more than the reverse, and similarly, they have lined up with America because their own self-interest desperately requires it.

After all, whatever benefits Americans get from these arrangements, the United States is located thousands of miles away from any rivals that could seriously threaten it, and retains more-than-ample power to deter attacks on the homeland from any minimally rational adversary. (Alliances have no apparent potential to strengthen U.S. security against non-rational enemies armed with weapons of mass destruction.) The allies, however, are all located very close to countries that can cause them major grief, and Washington’s assistance is especially prized not only because it is abundant, but because it comes from a power too far away to dominate them in any meaningful sense.

It’s true that, during the Cold War, major fears were expressed about Western Europe “Finlandizing” itself and agreeing to some form of informal Soviet hegemony. And one concrete problem could have ensued – Moscow could have interfered with U.S. efforts to supply Middle East military ventures through European bases. But if no such scenario unfolded during those decades, why would it emerge given the much weaker state of contemporary Russia? Even weirder, given the enormous American potential recently revealed for substantial energy independence, and given Europe’s continued reliance on the Middle East, control of the continent would put the onus on Vladimir Putin to defend the free flow of oil from that dysfunctional region, and generally police it. More power to him.

For their part, America’s Asian allies have significant reasons to kowtow to China – mainly because so many of them are connected with the PRC economically through the vast multinational manufacturing production complex the region has become. At the same time, commerce (properly understood) also prevents East Asia from simply casting its lot with the Chinese and excluding the United States in any (further) meaningful way. For America is by far the single biggest national customer for the products turned out by their export-heavy economies. China is way too poor, way too protectionist, and way too export-led itself to serve as a substitute.

The former military leaders are on firmer ground in suggesting that America’s allies have reason to doubt U.S. defense commitments. But that has nothing to do with the fate of trade deals. Instead, it reflects chronic doubts about whether the United States would risk its own security on their behalf, especially against nuclear-armed adversaries. Washington’s traditional response has been stationing U.S. forces (and during the Cold War, their families) directly in harm’s way, to increase the odds that attacks on the allies would claim U.S. victims. Thus American leaders would be left with no real choice but to respond in kind, the allies would recognize this, and adversaries would be further deterred.

Since the Cold War’s end, these American “tripwires” have been thinned out, but they’re still deployed in Korea, Japan, and Germany. The big new commitment questions raised in Europe have concerned the conspicuously complete lack of permanently stationed tripwires in the newer NATO members that were once part of the Soviet bloc but that still may be in Putin’s sites. In the Far East, the credibility of the American deterrent, as I’ve written, is being undermined by the ongoing development of Chinese and North Korean nuclear forces capable of striking American territory and largely invulnerable to retaliation or preemption. Neither trade deal being pursued by the president has the slightest chance of easing these doubts.

There is one way that the TPP could bolster the American stake in East Asia’s security status quo – if the deal had any real promise of reducing the region’s main predatory trade practices and turning U.S. commerce with it from a net loser to a net winner, or something close. But since these Asian practices (and barriers) are generally informal, and carried out by bureaucracies that are expert at keeping secrets from foreigners, they’ve been difficult enough for Americans even to identify and document, much less combat effectively.

Finally, it’s vital to point out that, for all the alarms sounded by these former military leaders about using TPP specifically to offset China’s rise and economic influence over its neighbors, not one of them has ever registered a single complaint about the wealth and technology (including defense-related knowhow) that American policy has showered on China for literally decades. This apparent ignorance of the first maxim of strategy – don’t enrich and empower your enemy – shows that these former defense officials and senior generals and admirals may not deserve to be taken seriously even on many national security questions, let alone on trade issues.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: The Laughable Claim of No Alternative to (This) TPP

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currency manipulation, economic growth, environmental standards, geopolitics, gross domestic product, intellectual property, labor standards, Robert Samuelson, TPP, Trade, Trans-Pacific Partnership, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Only in 21^st century America could a leading pundit who is not brain dead look at a policy that’s completely failed and dare those criticizing similar measures to explain, “Compared to what?”

Of course, I’m talking about Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson’s article this morning on President Obama’s proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement. The record plainly shows that trade flows shaped by the deals on which this planned pact is based, and similar trade policies, have cut U.S. economic growth by nearly 16 percent in real terms during the current – historically feeble – economic recovery. So I guess Samuelson hasn’t heard of the maxim, “First, do no harm.”

In addition, the author inexplicably overlooks the current TPP debate both inside and outside Congress – which centers not on killing the agreement completely, but on adding measures the critics believe will improve it. So his question “Compared to what?” is easily answered by pointing to proposals to strengthen TPP’s labor and environment provisions, add enforceable curbs on currency manipulation, and change or eliminate a host of controversial new non-trade rules covering intellectual property rights, legal relations between business and government, and many other issues. It’s legitimate to debate the wisdom of these ideas. It’s completely bogus to pretend that they don’t exist.

Unless Samuelson is neglecting these recommendations because he’s one of those viewing them as ploys whose only purpose is killing the chances of any agreement? Leave aside the inconvenient truth that confidence in this position logically requires clairvoyant abilities denied to most of our species. We’re still left with the question of why the United States shouldn’t be able to secure these changes to TPP.

After all, as I’ve demonstrated, America’s economy represents nearly two-thirds of the output of the initial TPP zone, it’s growing faster than those of most other TPP countries, and even those TPP countries with relatively high growth rates depend heavily on selling to the United States to sustain their expansions. A negotiator who can’t exploit this leverage – and in fact, win special enforcement authority for Washington – should be fired for incompetence.

In fact, these obvious points could explain why Samuelson spent so much of his column on the supposed geopolitical case for TPP (which is transparently silly in its own right, since the China whose rise TPP is supposed to counter has already attracted most of the prospective TPP members into its own infrastructure bank). He knows the economic arguments are losers.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Real Lesson of Vietnam

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Baby Boomers, economics, energy, foreign policy establishment, geopolitics, internationalism, interventionism, isolationism, Middle East, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Persian Gulf, public opinion, realism, terrorism, Vietnam War

No one who lived through it in 40 years ago, and was following the news even sporadically (far from everyone in the dazed and confused mid-1970s!), will ever forget the TV footage of U.S. military helicopters evacuating the last Americans and at least some of their local allies from Saigon in a humiliating denouement to the Vietnam War.

Even for many Americans who had lost much of their faith in the country’s virtues (all too easy in that stagflationary aftermath of the turbulent 1960s and the Watergate scandals), and who had watched disaster in Southeast Asia unfold slowly for years, this final act was surely harrowing emotionally. After all, however ugly Americans might have become to however many foreign populations, anything smacking of lasting military defeat had never been experienced in U.S. history.

The simple uncertainty of life without Vietnam-related news at least in the backdrop must have been unnerving as well, even if not consciously. Those who had actively or passively defined themselves as opponents, supporters, or bewildered spectators of the war faced even greater questions. Four decades later, it’s anything but clear if many of them have been answered among Baby Boomers and their surviving elders.

Failure in Vietnam shook up the nation’s leadership classes and foreign policy establishment, too. But what’s most striking four decades later is how few fundamental challenges to the policy status quo have emerged in these circles. The public is clearly more skeptical of foreign intervention and international engagement, although televised Middle East horrors in particular have interrupted that trend for the time being.

In addition, throughout the post-Vietnam decades, a handful of analysts has cogently explained how the Indochina debacle stemmed directly from the foreign policy strategies pursued by the United States since Pearl Harbor, and how this approach would undermine prosperity as well as needlessly court risk. (I’ve made my own small contributions, on this blog and elsewhere.  If you’re interested in others, I wholeheartedly recommend Googling – and reading! – the following “realists” in particular: Earl C. Ravenal, Robert W. Tucker, David C. Calleo, and Christopher Layne. For powerful indictments of U.S. interventionism on an issue-by-issue basis, see the many writings of Ted Galen Carpenter.)

But as I’ve argued, the left, right, and centrist wings of the foreign policy mainstream clung determinedly to an ideology called internationalism.  It’s characterized by the bizarre conviction that a geopolitically secure continental power with an immense potential for economic self-sufficiency can not be acceptably safe or prosperous unless literally every corner of the world becomes safe and prosperous, too. As a result, liberals, moderates, and conservatives alike defined American vital interests in breathtakingly sweeping terms, differing only on which combination or ratio of tactics (mainly the “hard power” versus “soft power” debate) were likeliest to pacify, stabilize, and enrich the entire planet.

In the process, all these leaders and analysts have neglected opportunities to reduce the country’s vulnerabilities to disrupted supplies of foreign goods, like energy, and to terrorist attack. Indeed, in defiance of the defining feature of economics itself, all have assumed that all the material resources to pursue this limitless agenda would somehow always be available, or could be created as needed.

That’s why, in the forty years since the fall of Saigon, American leaders from all over the political spectrum have:

>obsessed over fighting leftist forces in miniscule El Salvador and Nicaragua;

>fought two wars in Iraq, largely to protect the flow of Persian Gulf oil;

>permitted the worst attack on American territory in 70 years to take place;

>allowed the nation’s armed forces to become dangerously dependent on imports from a prospective Chinese adversary;

>kept the nation locked into defending allies against nuclear-armed adversaries increasingly able to retaliate powerfully against the United States;  

>remained committed to a futile policy of safeguarding U.S. energy and anti-terror interests by fostering stability and reform in a Middle East so thoroughly dysfunctional that it’s very state structure is falling apart;

>become addicted to preserving the semblance of growth and well-being by falling ever deeper into debt even though this blueprint triggered one financial calamity less than a decade ago;  and

>devoted oceans of rhetoric, and real and digital ink, to sliming any genuine dissenters as ostrich-headed isolationists, xenophobes, appeasers, or all of the above.  

As a result, all the commentary I’ve read that’s been occasioned by 40^th anniversary of Saigon’s fall has missed the main point. The most important lesson Vietnam is that American leaders have learned no important lessons at all.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: A Welcome New Call for Diplomatic Realism?

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Fareed Zakaria, foreign policy, geography, geopolitics, global engagement, internationalism, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Peter Zeihan, self-sufficiency, strategic independence, TheAccidental Superpower

It’s hard to know what’s more surprising – that Washington Post/CNN pundit Fareed Zakaria can write a column that’s not a monument to plagiarism, or that the subject of the column is a new book that seems to echo my writings on how the United States is amply capable of prospering without much economic or military engagement with the rest of the world.

I haven’t read the book yet (titled The Accidental Superpower), but the main theme sure sounds like the points I’ve been making: On his website, author Peter Zeihan writes that “geography will matter more than ever in a de-globalizing world, and America’s geography is simply sublime.” Especially intriguing are Zeihan’s related claims that the “hard rules of geography are eroding the American commitment to free trade” and that although the world is heading toward a new age of disorder, this deveiopment may be a “disaster-in-waiting” for most countries, “but not for the Americans.”

It’s kind of entertaining to see how a typical internationalist like Zakaria deals with all of this. He writes that Zeihan believes that America is logically returning to “its traditional, pre-1945 strategy, to prosper far from the ills of the world” but pooh poohs the idea that anything lasting – like geography – has much to do with this potential. Instead, he credits the supposedly genius policies U.S. leaders used to combat the financial crisis – and contends that Washington gridlock is putting all this out-performance at risk.

At the same time, Zakaria never explicitly responds to what he describes as Zeihan’s contention that “As the world gets messier…there are fewer compelling reasons for the United States to pay with blood and treasure to stabilize it.”  Indeed, Zakaria seems most concerned with portraying The Accidental Superpower as a slightly different iteration of American triumphalism, rather than with seriously exploring the stunning policy implications of the distinctive strengths underlying it.

Again, I haven’t read Zeihan’s book, and I haven’t even been able to find an article-length version. But it looks like those of us who have been questioning the economic and geopolitical foundations of modern American internationalism could have an important new ally – and one who might force some of the bipartisan internationalist foreign policy establishment to take notice.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: When Things Went Wrong

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Cold War, foreign policy establishment, geopolitics, grand strategy, Great Britain, interventionism, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, U.S. foreign policy, Walter Lippmann, World War II

As winter, 2014-15 approaches, the United States finds itself

>struggling to avert another 9-11-type attack by fighting a half-hearted campaign in the Middle East that even hawks fear could last decades;

>slowly getting drawn into a potentially terrifying game of chicken in the skies over Europe with a nuclear-armed Russia:

>tying itself up in knots over protecting the public from an Africa-born disease;

>trapped in a strategy of fighting nuclear wars to defend protectionist Asian powers that have decimated its productive economy; and

>heavily reliant on foreign powers – friendly and otherwise – for everything from energy to industrial machinery to credit itself.

Nor are these predicaments at all exceptional over a period spanning decades. Both Democratic and Republican presidents have plunged the nation into military ventures in countries as far-flung and as poor and weak as Vietnam, Haiti, Somalia, and Bosnia, and fought proxy wars in equally peripheral Cental America and Angola. The United States has been so completely addicted to foreign, and therefore Middle East, oil for so long that it has preferred military intervention in this distant, politically dysfunctional, and deeply anti-American region rather than developing home-grown alternatives. Meanwhile, domestic and international deficits, along with debt-led growth, have been economic constants for the immensely wealthy American economy since the early 1970s.

Yet despite these vulnerabilities and dependencies, this same United States remains located thousands of miles from its greatest potential adversaries. As a result, it remains fully capable of deterring any form of attack on its own territory and of controlling its borders, and is still endowed with nearly all the human and material resources to prosper through its own efforts and devices.

Of course, any strategic disconnect this massive, costly, dangerous, and long-lasting owes to numerous culprits. But I’d like to add a name that’s probably found on few, if any lists: Walter Lippmann. I know that I’ve probably startled anyone who’s just read that sentence and knows a thing or two about modern U.S. foreign policy. The great journalist, philosopher, and advisor to presidents and numerous other leading politicians from the 1910s through his death in 1974 is usually regarded as a founding father of realist thinking in American diplomacy.

In so many ways Lippmann deserves this reputation. His main contribution to the cause of sound foreign policymaking was his observation that the indispensable ingredient for preserving security and other vital goals was bringing a nation’s power into a sustainable balance with its commitments, and maintaining this balance.

All the same, I also hold Lippmann uniquely responsible for the conviction held by of all wings of the nation’s foreign policy establishment that, despite the clearest lessons of geography and history, America is exquisitely sensitive to all manner of events all over the world. In his seminal 1943 book, U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic, Lippmann told his countrymen that they were tragically and dangerously mistaken in viewing the United States as a continent-sized nation with game-changing advantages like multi-thousand mile wide ocean barriers and a treasure trove of minerals.

Instead, according to this supposedly quintessential diplomatic pragmatist, the United States is an island. And not just the United States. The entire Western Hemisphere is an island. It floats in “an immense oceanic lake of which the other great powers control the shores.” As a result, both North and South America are as totally at the mercy of potential aggressors from the rest of the world as other islands like the Philippines and Australia.

Lippmann argued that America’s potential enemies on the world lake shore enjoy an unbeatable combination of geographic advantage, boast combined military potential far greater than America’s, and in an age of long-range air power, are located much closer in strategic terms than his complacent countrymen realized.

Two related policy imperatives flowed from Lippmann’s analysis. First, Americans can not achieve adequate levels of security simply through a strategy of “passive defense” of the Western Hemisphere. In the new age of intercontinental air power in particular, they need to prevent the control by hostile or possibly hostile forces of “all the trans-oceanic lands from which an attack by sea or by air can be launched.” (Emphasis added.) Second, because the global power balance would always be so unfavorable, the nation needs “dependable” allies and must actively cooperate with them in creating and maintaining strategic parity or superiority.

In fairness to Lippmann, he did not portray America’s choice as either active global engagement or military defeat. The likeliest consequence of relying on passive defense, he seemed to believe, would be “remaining in an advanced stage of mobilization” similar to that toward which the nation was moving in the early post-Pearl Harbor years when he was writing. At the same time, the author made clear his grave doubts both on economic and military grounds that this approach could succeed for any significant stretch of time.

In fairness also, Lippmann can not be faulted for failing to foresee the creation of nuclear weapons and especially platforms with intercontinental range – which in sufficient numbers simply take off the table the threat of conventional attack on America. After all, how many minutes would an enemy invasion fleet be at sea – assuming it could even set sail – before it would be wiped out by U.S. nuclear-tipped missiles? And even before the atomic age, an airborne invasion force would have required enemies to control a hopelessly huge amount of airspace.

Nonetheless, there’s no sign that the advent of nuclear weapons changed Lippmann’s thinking significantly. Much more important, his fundamental island analysis not only survived, but unmistakably contained the seeds of the global containment strategy eventually adopted following World War II.

Why did the island analysis not only remain in favor, but become hugely more popular once the nuclear age arrived? My sense is that it’s for much the same reason that it occurred to Lippmann in the first place: the almost complete extent to which the overlapping American political, economic and social establishments in the first half of the 20^th century – and the national foreign policy establishment it spawned – identified with Britain.

It’s widely accepted that the perceived affinity with Britain – which in turn reflected numerous actual family ties as well as broader shared English heritage – was so intensely felt that it produced not only common political, cultural, and social values, but common views on foreign policy goals and global missions. But I suspect this affinity also shaped perceptions of America’s strategic circumstances.

That is, in those decisive early Cold War years, America’s foreign policy mandarins so closely identified with Britain that they considered their own gargantuan, naturally wealthy, remote country to be comparable geopolitically with a small, resource-poor nation located 20 miles from countries that had historically been deadly enemies. They were incapable of recognizing that if, in some technical sense, the Western Hemisphere is an island, it’s one that extends from pole to pole – and that, combined with the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, it enjoys what some international relations scholars call existential security.

More recently, of course, the foreign policy establishment has become far more diverse in every conceivable way. Yet its members remain as instinctively interventionist as ever, differing at best on specific modes and tactics, not on the more fundamental need to engage and on the alleged impossibility of qualitative alternatives. These views, moreover, are wholeheartedly accepted by the media organizations that tightly control the nation’s foreign policy debate, and thus at least implicitly decide which ideas are acceptable and which are taboo.  As a result, the only reasonable forecast for U.S. foreign policy for the foreseeable future is more needless cost, danger, and dependence, and zero fresh thought from practitioners and even America’s most prominent strategists.