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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Making News: Detailed Breitbart Report on Last Week’s Globalism Radio Interview

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., Breitbart News Tonight, Breitbart.com, globalism, John Binder, Making News, Robert Kagan, Washington Post

I’m pleased to announce that that “Breitbart News Tonight” radio interview of mine last Friday on the recent Washington Post tome defending globalism was featured today on the Breitbart “print” website.  You might be especially interested in this detailed summary by Breitbart reporter John Binder in part because his piece seems to have generated lots of buzz in social media – and lots of traffic for this blog.

All the more reason to keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

Making News: Podcast On-Line of a New National Radio Interview on Globalism…& More!

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Breitbart News Tonight, China, globalism, Hong Kong, Making News, nationalism, Robert Kagan, South China Morning Post, The Washington Post

I’m pleased to announce that a podcast of a national radio interview from last night is now on-line.  Conducted by the folks at Breitbart News Tonight, it addresses the wide range of issues raised by a (revealingly) humongous article by Robert Kagan defending globalist approaches to domestic and foreign policy (and singling out nationalism as a particular evil) that appeared yesterday in the Washington Post.  Go to this link and click on the March 15 entry with my name for a fascinating conversation that literally has it all – politics, world affairs, economics, history,  philosophy, and more!

Also, it was interesting, to put it mildly to be described as “anti-China” in this article from the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post by an author who “researches and writes about global, regional and Hong Kong challenges from a Hong Kong point of view.” Hong Kong, you’ll recall, is now controlled by China, and although Beijing has permitted the locals to maintain a modicum of free expression and self government, the range of permitted liberties keeps narrowing all the time.

For the record, I’m perfectly fine with the Chinese people in general, and with much of Chinese culture.  But the country’s government and leaders?  Not nearly so much

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

 

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Trump’s Acting Like Uncle Sucker on Alliance Burden-Sharing

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alliances, allies, America First, Blob, Bloomberg.com, burden sharing, Europe, globalism, Japan, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, South Korea, Trump

While much of the world is on pins and needles wondering whether President Trump will reach a big trade deal with China and how it will impact the U.S. economy and global commerce, Mr. Trump’s negotiating reputation has also been on the line on another major international front – America’s relations with its top security allies. And the latest reported developments add to the evidence that he’s going to fail miserably.

According to a March 8 Bloomberg.com article, the Trump administration is planning to insist that countries hosting American troops pay the full cost of these deployments, along with an extra 50 percent of that full cost for what’s described as the “privilege” of enjoying American protection.

Predictably, the allies, along with Washington, D.C.’s bipartisan globalist foreign policy establishment are sputtering with outrage – accusing the President of viewing these security relationships as lowly “transactional” relationships focused on enhancing purely American interests rather than as vital pillars of a global liberal, democratic order that since the end of World War II has benefited the United States more indirectly by promoting worldwide peace, prosperity, and democracy. In a journal article last year, I described at length why this quintessentially globalist approach to foreign policy and national security has long been creating many more big problems than it solves for a country as fundamentally secure and prosperous as the United States.

As a result, I strongly sympathize with any efforts to overhaul America’s alliances, however many specific criticisms I may have with the President’s tactics. But the most immediate problem with the Trump strategy is that the President keeps shooting himself in the foot. Specifically, he has repeatedly undercut U.S. leverage by proclaiming that he, too, views these arrangements as crucial for America to maintain.

For example, just two months ago, Mr. Trump insisted that “We’re gonna be with NATO [the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which binds the United States militarily to Europe] 100 percent ….” Last July, he declared “…I believe in NATO. I think NATO is a very important — probably the greatest ever done.” And the previous year, he explicitly endorsed the alliance’s Article V, which legally commits the United States to come to the defense of any member under outside attack.

Regarding the American alliance with South Korea, Mr. Trump told that country’s National Assembly in November, 2017 that U.S. commitment to that country’s defense represented a line “between peace and war, between decency and depravity, between law and tyranny, between hope and total despair. It is a line that has been drawn many times, in many places, throughout history. To hold that line is a choice free nations have always had to make. We have learned together the high cost of weakness and the high stakes of its defense.” 

And that June he vowed at a Washington, D.C. press conference with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, “the United States will defend itself, always will defend itself, always, and we will always defend our allies.”

Meanwhile, shortly after his inauguration, Mr. Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe issued a statement affirming that “The unshakable U.S.-Japan Alliance is the cornerstone of peace, prosperity, and freedom in the Asia-Pacific region. The U.S. commitment to defend Japan through the full range of U.S. military capabilities, both nuclear and conventional, is unwavering.”

It’s true that the President has spoken repeatedly, both as a candidate for the White House and as a chief executive, of his desire to withdraw American troops from these countries at some unspecified point. (This archive contains an indispensable, useful comprehensive collection.) But it’s also true that Mr. Trump has endorsed the defining globalist precept that U.S. “security and prosperity [have] depended” on “pushing back” versus threats to the allies.

During his successful White House run, candidate Trump faulted Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton – a Secretary of State under President Obama – for dooming any prospects for reforming American alliances by continually touting their paramount virtues. One of these critiques (cited in the aforementioned archive) is worth quoting at length:

“Now, Hillary Clinton said: ‘I will never leave Japan. I will never leave Japan. Will never leave any of our–‘ Well now, once you say that, guess what happens? What happens? You can’t negotiate. In a deal, you always have to be prepared to walk. Hillary Clinton has said, ‘We will never, ever walk.’ That’s a wonderful phrase, but unfortunately, if I were on Saudi Arabia’s side, Germany, Japan, South Korea and others, I would say, ‘Oh, they’re never leaving, so what do we have to pay them for?’ You always have to be prepared to walk. It doesn’t mean I want to walk. And I would prefer not to walk. You have to be prepared and our country cannot afford to do what we’re doing.”

In other words, Mr. Trump was making one of his characteristic charges that his opponent – and the establishment foreign policy “Blob” to which she’s belonged — had turned the United States into an “Uncle Sucker” who’d forgotten that Washington’s top priority is looking after the American people, not foreign populations. If he doesn’t get his alliance diplomacy act together soon, this self-described master deal-maker will start deserving the same label.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: America’s Foreign Policy Blob Challenged from Within

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alliances, allies, America First, Asia, Blob, burden sharing, Chas W. Freeman, East Asia, East Asia-Pacific, establishment, globalism, Japan, North Korea, nuclear deterrence, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, South Korea, Trade, Trump

Chas [that’s not a typo] W. Freeman isn’t exactly a household name. He’s even far from the most prominent member of the U.S. foreign policy “Blob” – the bipartisan establishment of current government bureaucrats, former officials, think tank-ers, academics, and journalists whose members for decades have both constantly changed exchanged jobs as their particular political patrons have rotated in and out of elected office, and helped keep the nation’s approach to international affairs on a strongly activist, interventionist (i.e., globalist) course for decades.

That is, they’ve succeeded in this mission until Donald Trump’s election as president, and even he hasn’t managed to throw off their grip completely. (See this 2018 article of mine for an explanation of how globalism and the “America First” approach touted by Mr. Trump differ, and examples of how his foreign policy decisions have reflected both strategies so far.)

But Freeman is a card-carrying member of the Blob – as one look at his bio should make clear. And that’s what makes this recent speech of his so interesting and important.

The address, delivered to a world affairs conference in Florida, has attracted the most attention (especially on Twitter) for its critique of President Trump’s China policy. And that makes perfect sense given the Freeman literally was present at the creation of the Nixon-era outreach to the People’s Republic that ended decades of Cold War hostility and set the framework for bilateral relations from the early 1970s until the Trump Era began.

But in my view, the China portions are eminently forgettable – amounting to a standard (but less oft-stated these days) Blob-y claim that the PRC is being scapegoated for chronic failures of U.S. domestic economic and social policy.

What really stands out is this passage – which clashes violently with the Blob’s defining worship of America’s security alliances and dovetails intriguingly, albeit only partially, with my own views of how America’s economic and security strategy toward China and the rest of East Asia should evolve.

According to Freeman (and he’s worth quoting in full):

“President Trump has raised the very pertinent question: Should states with the formidable capabilities longstanding American “allies” now have still be partial wards of the U.S. taxpayer? In terms of our own security, are they assets or liabilities? Another way of putting this is to ask: Do our Cold War allies and their neighbors now face credible threats that they cannot handle by themselves? Do these threats also menace vital U.S. interests? And do they therefore justify U.S. military presences and security guarantees that put American lives at risk? These are questions that discomfit our military-industrial complex and invite severe ankle-biting by what some have called ‘the Blob’ – the partisans of the warfare state now entrenched in Washington. They are serious questions that deserve serious debate. We Americans are not considering them.

“Instead, we have finessed debate by designating both Russia and China as adversaries that must be countered at every turn. This has many political and economic advantages. It is a cure for enemy deprivation syndrome – that queasy feeling our military-industrial complex gets when our enemies disorient us by irresponsibly defaulting on their contest with us and disappearing, as the Soviet Union did three decades ago. China and Russia are also technologically formidable foes that can justify American R&D and procurement of the expensive, high-tech weapons systems. Sadly, low intensity conflict with scruffy ‘terrorist’ guerrillas can’t quite do this.”

If you ignore what I view as the not-very-informative shots against the “warfare state,” you can see that Freeman comes close to exposing some of the main weaknesses and even internal contradictions of both main factions in the national China policy debate, and (unintentionally, but unmistakably) provides some support for the America First set of priorities I’ve proposed.

Specifically, supporters of pre-Trump China trade policies generally have insisted that China and the rest of East Asia are crucial to America’s economic future because of their huge and fast-growing markets and overall dynamism. But although they staunchly back maintaining the U.S. alliances in the East Asia-Pacific region that has long aimed to secure the political independence of its non-communist countries and thereby keep their economies open to American exports and investment, they keep ignoring three major problems created by this approach.

>First, the trade and broader China economic policies they’ve stood for have greatly enriched and strengthened the country posing the greatest threat to East Asian security. (See, e.g., this column.) 

>Second, because of the growth and increasing sophistication of Chinese and North Korean nuclear forces, America’s alliances in the region have brought the U.S. homeland under unprecedented threat of nuclear attack from both of these rivals.

>Third, despite the alliances, countries like Japan and South Korea have remained highly protectionist economies whose trade predation has damaged America’s overall economy and particularly its manufacturing base. In fact, there’s every reason to believe that U.S. security objectives have enabled this allied trade predation, by preventing Washington from retaliating effectively for fear of antagonizing Tokyo and Seoul.

The Trump policy mix strikes me as being much more internally consistent. In large measure because of fears of growing Chinese military might, it’s trying to use both trade and investment policy to curb Beijing’s use of intellectual property theft and technology extortion in particular to gain regional parity with U.S. forces and thus make America’s alliance commitments much more dangerous and costly to fulfill. The administration also deserves credit for recognizing the purely economic damage Asian trade predation has caused America.

But for all the president’s complaints about defense burden-sharing, he, too, appears determined to keep the alliances intact. Hence his recent insistence that South Korea pay more of the costs of the U.S. troop deployments on its soil despite his repeated claims about the alliance’s necessity. Just as important, although the Trump Asia policies have sought more balanced trade flows with regional allies, these very efforts make clear how unsatisfactory these economic relationships have been. As a result, they sandbag the case that the United States must run major military risks to preserve them.

Freeman’s speech suggests support for a different set of priorities. In one sense, they’re logical: If, as he suggests, its security alliances in East Asia are no longer good deals for the United States, then it’s indeed not such a big deal from a security perspective if America’s economic policies toward China are helping Beijing increase its military power – and boost the odds that it will someday control the region to America’s economic detriment.

Yet Freeman’s apparent priorities fail on the purely economic front, as they seem to propose doing nothing whatever to combat the Chinese policies that have harmed America’s economy.

And that’s why the America First recipe I’ve proposed makes the most sense:

>First, disengaging from an increasingly hostile and economically dangerous China (largely because no trade deal can be adequately verified).

>Second, recognizing that trade with the entire East Asian region has been a loser for the United States and certainly not worth the growing military risks to the American homeland – and thereby concluding that the U.S.’ still-overwhelming economic leverage is likeliest to secure whatever improvements in trade and commercial relations are needed.

>Third, wherever possible, using this economic leverage to shift jobs offshored to Asia but not likely to return to the United States (because they’re too labor-intensive and therefore “low tech”) to Mexico and Central America. The resulting new economic opportunities could go far toward solving the Western Hemisphere’s immigration problems.

Unfortunately, because the Trump administration has its Asia priorities so confused, optimism regarding major changes is tough to justify. But Freeman’s willingness to challenge from within the Blob’s fetishization of U.S. alliances, however flawed, is a ray of hope. And who was it who said that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step?

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: A Laughable Indictment of Trump’s World Bank Choice

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David Malpass, economic development, Financial Times, globalism, multilateralism, third world, Trump, World Bank, {What's Left of) Our Economy

I was going to post this morning on more implications of yesterday’s new monthly U.S. trade figures, but as so often happens, the Mainstream Media has just come out with an article whose mind-boggling cluelessness reveals such deep-seated biases that I had to switch gears. Special bonus – it didn’t even come from a mainstay of the establishmentarian U.S. foreign policy and globalization Blob. Instead, we have the Financial Times editorial board to thank.

What other conclusion can be reasonably drawn from the FT editorial slamming President Trump’s appointment of David Malpass to head the World Bank?

Not that Malpass has been God’s Gift to Economics or to the cause of third world economic development. But according to the FT, a big problem with Malpass is that he lacks the leadership experience as well as intellectual and often political heft of previous U.S. choices like – wait for it – Robert S. McNamara.

That’s right – the same Robert McNamara who deserves such blame for the American disaster in Vietnam. What’s next for the FT? Criticizing Mr. Trump for appointing a senior military adviser lacking the battlefield genius of George Armstrong Custer?

Almost as bad: What’s given the FT editorialists the idea that McNamara, or any of his pre-Malpass successors, was such a whiz at the Bank? Here’s an appraisal of McNamara’s tenure arguing that he unintentionally created “incentives for Bank staff and management to push money out the door, sometimes with relatively little regard for how it would be used—a practice that still bedevils the Bank’s work today.” And this was from an admirer.

A second major FT argument against Malpass looks more reasonable at first glance:

“His judgment even on economics, his supposed speciality, is wanting. Notoriously, as then chief economist at Bear Stearns, Mr Malpass was blithely confident about the strength of the US economy in 2007 — a year before the global financial crisis hit and his own employer went under.”

What the FT conveniently forgets, though, is that using this standard would rule out virtually every economist in the world as World Bank president.  

Considerably stronger is the FT‘s observation that “As early as 2011 [Malpass] suggested tightening monetary policy and driving up the dollar, a hard-money philosophy entirely at odds with the reality that the Fed had averted economic disaster.”

The problem with this school of thought is that, although the Federal Reserve’s flooding of the American economy with easy money may have been necessary to keep the nation (and world) afloat, it’s also arguably created a global addiction to super-cheap credit that’s kneecapped chances of restoring genuine long-run economic health.

As contended by no less an economic authority than Lawrence Summers (a former World Bank research chief), the result has been “secular stagnation” – the inability of the United States or other major countries to grow acceptably without inflating lending and spending bubbles that are doomed to burst disastrously.

As the editorial makes clear, the FT mainly objects to Malpass because he’s “deeply sceptical of multilateral institutions.” Which would be funny even if the FT itself didn’t describe the Bank as already “dysfunctional” – despite being led by McNamara and all his supposedly genius successors.

More fundamentally, all else equal, why should anyone lack skepticism about any means to an end? Worshiping multilateralism is like worshiping a hammer. Sometimes is the best tool to use; sometimes it’s not.

The FT reasonably argues that “With an increasing number of rival sources of development finance — not to mention private capital — the bank needs to think hard about where it can best add value.” The paper just as reasonably concludes that effecting change requires its president “to be a critical friend of multilateralism who recognises that its institutions need to be adapted to a changing world, not an instinctive ideological enemy.”

But given that these – and other – problems with the Bank have persisted for so long, it’s hard to imagine that a leader accepted by multilateral fetishists like the FT would generate the necessary push.

As a result, the Malpass nomination can just as reasonably be viewed as a Trump administration attempt to change the kind of losing game coddled for so long by diehard multilateralists like the FT editorial board. Such critics should exhibit a little more humility before writing him off as a sure failure. Not to mention minimal historical memory. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The U.S. Public Opinion Gap isn’t Only Partisan

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alliances, America First, climate change, Democrats, globalism, Immigration, Jobs, national security, nuclear deterrence, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Pew Research Center, Republicans, terrorism, Trump, weapons of mass destruction

A recent (November 29) Pew Research Center poll on public attitudes toward foreign policy issues was a classic good news/bad news story – at least if you believe that the top priority of American foreign policy should be to promote the security and well-being of the American people.

On the one hand, that’s pretty much what the results show – that’s the good news. On the other hand, these commonsense positions prevail overwhelmingly because adults viewing themselves as either Republicans or Republican leaners hold them. That’s the bad news.  In other words, the views of Democrats and those leaning Democratic reveal a marked disregard for their nation’s self-preservation and prosperity.

According to Pew, 72 percent of all Americans say that “taking measures to protect the U.S. from terrorism” should “be a top foreign policy priority,” 71 percent would assign the same priority to “protecting jobs of American workers,” and 66 percent regard “preventing the spread” of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) with similar urgency.

But now check out the partisan splits: On the terrorism issue, fully 84 percent of Republicans and their leaners regard it as a top foreign policy priority. Only 61 percent of Democrats and their leaners agree. So much, i.e., for the idea that Americans will never forget September 11. And remember – the question only described protection from terrorism as a top priority, not the top foreign policy priority.

On protecting American workers’ jobs, 81 percent of Republicans and their leaners would treat it as a priority, versus only 65 percent of Democrats and their leaners. I’m old enough to remember when the Democrat called themselves the party of working Americans.

The exception here is preventing the spread of WMD: Fewer (64 percent of Republicans and their leaners see it as a major priority than do Democrats and their leaners (68 percent), but these results are very close.

Many of the other Pew poll findings are not the slightest bit surprising. Principally, the biggest partisan divides on foreign policy issues come on “dealing with global climate change,” “reducing illegal immigration into the U.S.,” and “maintaining U.S. military advantage over all other countries.”

But here’s what’s more surprising. The Democrats, and especially their leaders, have enthusiastically assumed the mantle of globalism champions versus President Trump’s proclaimed America First approach. And a hallmark of globalism, whether on the right or the left ends of the national political spectrum, has been international activism. Liberals and conservatives generally disagree on where to place the emphasis (e.g., emerging transnational issues like climate change and migration versus more traditional security-oriented issues), but energetic engagement is favored by all.

Nonetheless, if you look carefully at the Pew results, Democrats and their leaners would place the “top priority” label on relatively few foreign policy issues. Indeed, only one such candidate for this status reaches the 70 percent mark with these groups – “improving relationships with allies.” And only four issues are seen as top priorities by 60 or more percent of Democrats and their leaners – as stated above, WMD (68 percent), protecting American jobs (65 percent), climate change (64 percent) and terrorism (61 percent). 

Overall, then, it’s easy to conclude from these and other findings in the Pew poll that Democrats and their leaners may be globalists, but they’re globalists who don’t seem to regard overseas-related challenges with overwhelming concern. Alternatively, they’re reluctant to support zeroing in on a limited (and arguably more manageable) set of goals. P.S., the relatively low score for climate change seems especially noteworthy given the importance progressive Democrats and others relatively far to the Left have attached to the idea of a “Green New Deal.”

It’s even easier to conclude that Republicans and their leaners are more committed to an America First-type approach. And it looks like this commitment is somewhat stronger. Their highest priority foreign policy issues are the aforementioned terrorism and job protection – where their priority scores are in the 80s percent. And their next three priorities are maintaining a national military edge (70 percent), reducing illegal immigration (68 percent), and preventing WMD spread (64 percent). For good measure, “getting other countries to assume more of the costs of maintaining world order” comes in at 56 percent.

However revealing these Pew results, they still left out two of the biggest questions for politicians and others trying to surmise which approaches to U.S. foreign policy, and what specific initiatives, would garner the most and least public support. The first is how genuine political independents view these issues. The second is how high a priority is assigned to preventing a nuclear attack on the U.S. homeland.

The importance attached to halting the spread of weapons of mass destruction points to great concern about this challenge. But the strong support expressed by Democrats and their leaners for shoring up America’s alliance relations indicates an especially serious lack of awareness on their part that indiscriminately extending nuclear umbrellas over U.S. allies has greatly increased the odds of such attack (principally from the newish NATO commitments to the highly vulnerable Baltic states, and the longstanding commitment to protect South Korea from North Korea and its new nuclear capabilities).

Of course, these Americans can’t entirely be blamed for this knowledge gap, as both U.S. leaders and the mainstream media continue to work overtime to mask the – growing – nuclear war risks inherent in the nation’s alliance system. (President Trump has been only a partial exception.) Hopefully 2019 will see some explicit, intellectually honest discussion of these dangers – and well before they reach critical mass.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Paul Volcker has Just Condemned Globalism

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alliances, Barron's, Federal Reserve, finance, globalism, manufacturing, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Paul Volcker, Trade

For decades, anyone (like yours truly) who’s even intelligently argued for fundamentally new strategies for U.S. foreign policy and trade policy has been dismissed by defenders of the longstanding globalist approaches as an isolationist or a know-nothing or a protectionist (to name a few slurs). So imagine my surprise to see the other day my own critique of globalism (which decries both its national security and economic dimensions) being closely mirrored by no less than Paul Volcker. Even better, Volcker seems to agree that the mistakes made by both the main aspects of globalism are closely related.

To remind, Volcker is a former Chairman of the Federal Reserve who, as top official at the central bank, had the rare combination of economic smarts and political courage to understand that the only plausible way to end the raging inflation that began crippling the country in the late-1970s was to clamp down hard on credit. A deep recession resulted, but largely because of Volcker’s tight-fisted approach, the economy’s subsequent growth during the 1980s and 1990s was significantly healthier (though not perfectly healthy) than before Volcker hiked interest rates and curbed the money supply’s expansion.

Previously, he served in a senior Treasury Department role at a key juncture of post-World War II U.S. and world economic history (when the post-war global monetary order was falling apart, and a new jerrybuilt order was cobbled together), and as an economist at the Fed. Since leaving the central bank (in 1987), Volcker has been a highly successful advocate of Wall Street reforms and a respected voice for responsible economic policies.  (Here’s a short, handy bio.)

Also to remind, my own basic description of what’s been wrong with America’s globalist policies is that they’ve acted as if developing various types of international arrangements (including institutions like the UN and International Monetary Fund and military alliances), which have been aimed at grandiose global goals (the world’s pacification via the spread of democracy and global economic integration), were the best guarantors of achieving acceptable levels of U.S. security and well-being. (See this article for the most recent, comprehensive statement of these views.)

Consequently, globalists softpedaled efforts to create and sustain the national military and economic strength needed for the country to survive and prosper in the world as it was likely to remain for the foreseeable future: dog-eat-dog and tumultuous. In the process, they regularly sacrificed crucial chunks of the real economy (that is, its most productive sectors) – and the huge number of good jobs they supported – in quixotic efforts to bolster those institutions and to win and keep those allies. As a result, they lost sight of what should be the overriding objective of all foreign policymakers: promoting the interests of the great majority of their own citizens in the most realistic, responsible possible ways (and my definition of responsibility includes financial responsibility).

Actually, Volcker’s indictment is even harsher than mine, at least in tone. In this interview with Barron‘s last week, he suggested that the globalists’ priorities were driven by their desire that America “dominate politically and foreign policy-wise.”

But the substance of our perspectives are remarkably similar. As Volcker argued (and it’s worth quoting the relevant passages in full):

“We were willing to run these current account deficits [in order to pay the mounting costs of globalism without requiring Americans to pay for them with politically toxic higher taxes], and it was favorable for businesses—they could invest abroad, import more freely. But eventually it breaks down. During that process, you lost a lot of small American manufacturing. Now we’re getting the blowback from that. A lot of people feel left out, and they were! We took great pride in open markets, free competition, no tariffs. That pleases the scholars, it pleases big business, but it doesn’t please the people in the part of the country that lost out.

“[Interviewer] Is that an argument for protectionist…?

“Sounds awful, doesn’t it? That’s a bad word.

“Everyone wants to help the home team. We were more interested in dominating politically and foreign-policy-wise. And then we paid, sacrificing rural industry in the process.

“When I was back in the Treasury, the old Treasury bureaucrats would be like, oh God, somebody’s going to visit the president next week, what’s he going to give away? Because other country’s leaders were intent on encouraging the U.S. to buy from them, and the president would say OK, you’re part of NATO, you’re this, you’re that, all these individually small concessions.

“[Interviewer] Am I oversimplifying what you’re saying: The Nixon shock [Nixon administration policies that brought the post-war monetary system to an end] which bought us 40 more years of political dominance?

“I don’t want to overdo it, but yeah. It oiled the wheels of our foreign policy, building a whole network of allies and international institutions and so forth. That’s part of the process, it’s not the whole process. The top dog pays the price [laughing].”

Because I’ve closely followed Volcker’s career, I’m more surprised by the bluntness of this analysis, not its content. But there was one aspect I found genuinely unexpected – his description of Treasury Department career bureaucrats. For decades, in my experience, they’ve been among the truest believers in globalism, including in the desirability of neglecting the productive economy in favor of finance. It seems that in Volcker’s day, they were far more realistic.

As with any argument worth making, critiques of globalism shouldn’t need to rely on “appeals to authority” – the specious practice of insisting on the superiority of a certain viewpoint mainly because supposed experts agree with it. But who could reasonably fault any globalism critics who take pride in being in such splendid company?

Im-Politic: George Bush’s Biggest Legacy

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alliances, America First, Cold War, George H.W. Bush, globalism, Im-Politic, international institutions, The Atlantic, The National Interest

OK, so that newspaper op-ed on the U.S.-China trade truce I mentioned in yesterday’s post won’t be appearing on-line till tonight. That enables me to sound off about the other big news of the past weekend: the passing of former President George H.W. Bush.

The fawning reactions by the nation’s intertwined bipartisan political establishment and Mainstream Media were off-putting in any number of ways – only beginning with the transparently crude, self-serving attempts to contrast the alleged courtly golden age of selfless, noble American politics and policy he represented (and that they allegedly champion today) with the triumph of coarseness, hyper-partisanship and grifter-ism supposedly represented by Donald Trump’s election as President.

Not that Bush wasn’t an admirable personality in many ways, including his unmistakable record as a devoted, loving husband and father, and his courageous service in World War II. And not that he didn’t display some equally admirable traits as President – including a willingness to compromise, an ability to learn and evolve, a refusal to demonize political opponents, and that famous “prudence” lampooned by Saturday Night Live’s Dana Carvey.

But Bush’s presidency was marked by way too many major blind spots and outright failures to deserve canonization, and it’s no coincidence that the most serious entailed a refusal to recognize the obsolescence and flaws of the globalist priorities and strategies to which the nation’s chattering classes still cling.

It’s possible to single out significant individual Bush blunders, like his enthusiasm for offshoring-friendly trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the global agreement that created the World Trade Organization (WTO); his indifference to predatory foreign trade and broader economic practices that were undermining American industrial competitiveness; and his belief that greater U.S. and other foreign engagement with China would produce a People’s Republic that was more democratic, capitalist, and friendly to the West.

Way more important, however, is the broader globalist outlook he almost defiantly epitomized, and which was responsible for his biggest, closely related strategic and political mistakes.

On the strategic front, Bush does deserve credit for contributing to the overwhelmingly peaceful demise of the Soviet Union and the equally smooth unification of Germany – neither of was inevitable. But he squandered a critical opportunity to begin preparing Americans for the kind of fundamental transition away from intertwined Cold War approaches to both national security and economics that would have left the nation much safer and more prosperous than today.

Bush’s fans have a point when they insist that strong support of America’s Cold War alliance system was essential to ensure that the fall of communism didn’t trigger broader and potentially dangerous worldwide instability. Too much simultaneous upheaval could well have produced worrisome consequences in Europe in particular.

Yet Bush wasn’t content to view or portray the preservation of alliances and other Cold War institutions as temporary expedients needed to ensure a successful closure to that era. He repeatedly spoke of these arrangements and their survival as ends in and of themselves that were vital to defend and advance core American interests because those interests required nothing less than a thoroughly peaceful, stable, prosperous world. And in this respect, he embodied what I have described in The National Interest as the fatal mistake of American globalism, and one that, through endeavors that sought to achieve this utopian ambition, over the longer term has kept the nation exposed to utterly unnecessary risks, strapped it with equally unnecessary economic burdens, and left it less secure and economically healthy in the long run.

In other words, Bush repeatedly championed the globalist conviction that the best guarantors of America’s security and prosperity were not America’s own power, wealth, and potential, but those very international institutions whose effectiveness he prioritized. As a result, he dismissed the idea that genuine pragmatism recognized the superiority of a fundamentally different approach – ensuring the well-being of an already substantially secure and prosperous nation regardless of international conditions. And therefore, whenever expanding or consolidating the nation’s own material capabilities, or capitalizing on its geopolitical blessings, clashed with expensive and or risky efforts to bolster the institutions and inch toward globalism’s grandiose worldwide goals, he invariably chose the latter.

The political results were devastating, and if you accept the above analysis, they rightly limited Bush to a single term as president. For, as I wrote in The Atlantic back then, the objectives of U.S. foreign policy became increasingly remote from the most pressing concerns of the American people, and Bush never understood the gap. Indeed, he not only became known as a “foreign policy president.” He actually admitted he found dealing with overseas matters much more interesting than addressing issues on the home front – notably a short, shallow recession that struck the electorate as much more serious because the recovery remained “jobless” for so long. When his main 1992 rival for the White House, Bill Clinton, ribbed Bush’s indifference with the slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid,” the fate of “41” was all but sealed, and history served up what should have been a glaringly obvious lesson for the globalists.

That this political lesson has been both ignored and often emphatically rejected by America’s bipartisan globalist establishment is clear from its ostentatiously teary eulogies for Bush – and its contempt for a chief executive with at least a gut-level awareness of the popular appeal of the non-globalist approach he calls “America First.”

Moreover, in a stunning irony, the globalists keep ignoring how thoroughly their own approach has failed – and how quickly. How else to explain that, over the course of the three globalist post-41 presidents, Russia and China have reemerged as major security threats to the order they constantly deem an unprecedented and historic success? And don’t forget how globalism’s economic and political roots have been shredded by a worldwide financial crisis and painful recession stemming directly from its failures on the trade and investment front.

At the same time, precisely because this globalist establishment remains so powerful, and President Trump’s departure from its orthodoxy so partial, it’s premature to view George H.W. Bush’s passing as symbolizing the true end of a policy era. As the former president once said in another context, that would require more of a “vision thing” than the nation has been capable of producing for many decades.