Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Why the Morals of the Ukraine War Really Matter

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international law, Israel, Leon Hadar, morality, nuclear war, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, public opinion, sovereignty, The National Interest, Ukraine, Ukraine War, Volodymyr Zelenskyy

National Interest contributing editor Leon Hadar has just posted a groundbreaking article on U.S. policy toward the Russian invasion of Ukraine – something I’d thought had become nearly impossible after about a year into the war and upteen zillion words of commentary on and analysis of the conflict. In the piece, Leon (full disclosure: a close personal friend) examines whether Ukraine can develop the kind of relationship with the U.S. government and, more important, the American public, that Israel has long enjoyed: that of a valued ally mainly because it’s admired by Americans, not because its survival advances any important, specific U.S. interests.

Rather than summarize Leon’s reasons for skepticism – which you should definitely read yourself – I’ll deal in this post with a fundamental U.S. foreign policy issue he touches on but that deserves much more attention. That’s because it reveals the importance of an aspect of the national debate over Ukraine policy that I’ve mistakenly belittled – whether that embattled country is a paragon of democracy and other Western ideals and virtues, or just another foreign kleptocracy that’s waged a great propaganda campaign.

My discounting of such moral questions has stemmed from two related beliefs: First, that it’s vastly more important to determine Ukraine’s intrinsic worth in terms of U.S. security, independence, and prosperity than to figure out whether its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is a valiant freedom fighter or a repressive, corrupt scoundrel. Second, it strikes me as axiomatic that it will always be easier for Americans to agree on concrete, national interest-related questions such as whether Ukraine’s location is strategic, or whether it contains resources America vitally need, than on more nebulous issues like Zelenskyy’s personal character. (I made the underlying point at length here – thirty years ago!)

In fact, my support for such priorities has grown stronger the longer the war has lasted, and the more destuctive it’s become – as both belligerents use increasingly sophisticated and/or long-range weapons that could spread its effects beyond Ukraine’s borders, and increase the odds of conflict between the nuclear-armed U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and a nuclear-armed Russia.

I’ve also emphasized that such grave risks could be justified if Ukraine were deemed a vital interest whatever Ukraine’s virtues or vices. But by the same token, I’ve called incurring these risks for less than vital stakes – which is obvious if only because NATO has still chosen not to admit Ukraine and thereby to guarantee its security even if nuclear war might result – the height of recklessness.

At the same time, it shouldn’t be forgotten – and I shouldn’t have forgotten – how the undeniable fact of U.S. sovereignty needs to influence this discussion. Very loosely speaking, sovereignty is the well established notion that in the international sphere, political communities (or individuals, as in the case of monarchies) have a right to act as they wish. This right is constrained only by whatever failures these communities or individuals experience in maintaining control over their territory, and in the view of some, by international law. (Those in the realist/realpolitik camp, like me, put no stock in that latter concept.)

In the United States, the people are sovereign; it would therefore be legitimate if the public decided to support Ukraine’s war effort simply because they admired Ukrainians and/or their government, or loathed their Russian counterparts, or some combination of the two. And this proposition logically holds whether any significant concrete U.S. interests are at stake, and whatever the actual risks of this position might be. Those risks in turn logically include nuclear risks.

So even though I view the moral character of both sides of the Ukraine war per se as irrelevant to America’s well-being, I’m going to be less dismissive of efforts to win this particular debate. The American public has every right to prioritize such considerations, and if friends and foes of current policies believe they can sway opinion by praising or disparaging Ukraine’s qualities (either if they themselves have taken them to heart, or to debunk misconceptions they believe have been created by the other side), that’s now perfectly fine with me.

In fact, as Leon’s article argues persuasively, sentiment and not calculations of self-interest have been the main bases of U.S. support for Israel. This support for Israel hasn’t been cost-free, In particular, it’s no doubt greatly complicated U.S. relations with the Arab Muslim world and all the oil it controls. But it’s hard to argue that this emotion-based and therefore largely uncritical backing of the Jewish state has backfired on America in any major way.

I’d just ask one favor of Ukraine War backers who stress the conflict’s moral dimensions: When making these arguments, how about reminding the public of the nuclear risk issue. For there’s much polling evidence that however much Americans admire the Ukrainian cause, most don’t agree that it merits courting the danger of nuclear attack. (See, e.g., here.) In other words, they evidently realize that, however important and ethical it is to like and value admirable foreign peoples and governments and their survival, it’s even more important and at least as ethical to like and value your own.

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(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Now Biden’s Gone America First on the World Trade Organization

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America First, Biden administration, GATT, General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, globalism, international law, national security, sovereignty, Trade, Trump administration, World Trade Organization, WTO, {What's Left of) Our Economy

If someone told you that the U.S. government has outsourced to an international organization the legal authority to decide when American national security is endangered – and inevitably how it can respond – you’d probably think they were pretty out there, or shamelessly lying.

Except that’s exactly what happened in 1947, when globalist U.S. leaders agreed to the body of rules aimed at governing international trade in the post-World War II world, and what remained the case for decades afterward. And although last week, the Biden administration moved decisively to restore sanity to U.S. trade policy in this respect, it didn’t make the complete policy about face that’s still needed.

Since protecting a country’s security is by far the Number One responsibility of any national government, such governments need to be the supreme deciders of how to carry out this mission on an ongoing basis. Further, the legitimacy of this authority logically goes double when democratic national governments like the United States’ are concerned. Why should any other power or organization hold any ability to veto or even influence choices made by the American people’s duly elected representatives to ensure their system’s safety, much less survival? Indeed, on what valid basis could such an ability actually exist? The kindness of strangers? Their superior wisdom?

These maxims are so self-evident (as America’s Declaration of Independence might put it), that even the main body of international law (a system not known for its pragmatism) recognizes them as fundamental attributes of a country’s sovereignty – its bedrock right to take whatever steps it considers needed to keep itself in existence. And how can this security be maintained if its leaders lack the unfettered ability to figure out when threats are present and what they consist of, and if they constantly need to be worrying about is whether the policies they choose pass international muster or not?

But the crucial importance of national sovereignty wasn’t so self-evident to American leaders in World War II’s aftermath. For in the bylaws of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) – the global trade regime that was turned into the World Trade Organization (WTO) at the beginning of 1995 – they agreed to an article that safeguarded a member state’s right to take “any action [to restrict trade] which it considers necessary for the protection of its essential security interests.” Crucially, however, this same Article XXI then proceeded to set out three criteria that such actions needed to meet in order to pass the legality test – including the specification that trade restrictions take place “in time of war or other emergency in international relations.”

These U.S. leaders might have had some decent excuses. First, this was an age when the United States bestrode the world like a titan. How could it be plausibly threatened by mere words on paper? Further, countries outside the Communist camp (none inside signed onto the new trade pact until the mid-1960s) were hardly likely to want to tie America’s military hands since most relied so heavily on U.S. protection.

Second, the GATT lacked effective procedures for enforcing its rules. And third, Washington has always assumed that the Article XXI’s reference to actions that members “consider necessary” means that the entire measure (including the insistence that trade restrictions are legal only in certain types of international conditions) is “self-judging” – i.e., that members’ have the final say over whether it can both define its security interests and the situations in which they can be invoked to override the GATT/WTO’s ban on trade curbs.

But however understandable the U.S. position might have been in 1947, dramatic changes in national and global circumstances over decades should have alerted Washington long ago that Article XXI was bound to cause trouble. Chiefly, America’s predominant global military and economic role inevitably eroded. Many of its allies became formidable economic competitors. The line between military goods and civilian goods – never completely clear – became thoroughly blurred as products incorporating “dual use” technologies proliferated. And the birth of the WTO gave the world trade system a much more effective enforcement system.

Here it’s important to be really specific. It’s not that the WTO can muster a police force, march into the District of Columbia, and compel U.S. officials to follow its dictates. The effectiveness of this dispute resolution system is based on its authority to permit countries claiming to be harmed by U.S. (or any members’) trade practices to respond with retaliatory tariffs – which can be strategically targeted on the kinds of domestic industries powerful enough to launch lobbying campaigns able to force their governments into compliance.

So it’s easy to see why many WTO members – most of which rely heavily on net exporting to the U.S. market to achieve satisfactory levels of growth and employment) would want to use Article XXI to undercut American sovereignty in order to gain advantages for their own industries – including allies who had learned that the United States would continue protecting them and tolerating their defense free-riding even after serious provocations.

Earlier this month, this gambit paid off in spades, as the WTO declared illegal the U.S. tariffs avowedly imposed on steel and aluminum imports for national security reasons by former President Trump in spring, 2018.

Fortunately, in reality, none of the plaintiff countries can legally counter-tariff these U.S. curbs – because that same former President Trump effectively neutered the WTO dispute-resolution system by leaving seats on its appeals panels empty and preventing that body from convening to handle any next legal steps. And to his credit, President Biden has declined to appoint replacements as well.

Also to its credit, though, his administration “strongly rejected” these WTO rulings, and declared that “The United States has held the clear and unequivocal position, for over 70 years, that issues of national security cannot be reviewed in WTO dispute settlement and the WTO has no authority to second-guess the ability of a WTO Member to respond to a wide-range of threats to its security….The United States will not cede decision-making over its essential security to WTO panels.”

Unfortunately, the Biden administration didn’t take this position when it should have – once these foreign suits were filed to begin with. In fact, the administration not only (weirdly) agreed that the WTO does have jurisdiction when national security concerns come into play, but only in the sense that it was required to approve of members’ freedom to invoke these considerations to justify trade barriers. It also went to ridiculous lengths to defend the U.S. position as if WTO members were not able to self-judge their national security claims – to the point of trying to show grammatically that the plaintiffs were misreading Article XXI grammatically.

Think I’m kidding? Here’s how the one of the WTO reports presenting the anti-U.S. ruling described the U.S. effort, including direct quotes from the American brief:

“A premise of the United States’ characterization of Article XXI (b) as ‘self-judging’ is that, based on ‘the text and grammatical structure’ of the provision, ‘the phrase ‘which it considers’ qualifies all of the terms in the single relative clause that follows the word ‘action’. According to the United States, this ‘single relative clause’ in Article XXI(b) ‘begins with ‘which it considers necessary’ and ends at the end of each subparagraph’ and ‘describes the situation which the Member ‘considers’ to be present when it takes such ‘action’. The United States argues from this premise that, ‘[b]ecause the relative clause describing the action begins with ‘which it considers’, the other elements of this clause are committed to the judgment of the Member taking the action.’ The United States thus posits an ‘overall grammatical structure’ of Article XXI(b) according to which a panel may not ‘determine, for itself, whether a security interest is ‘essential’ to the Member in question, or whether the circumstances described in one of the subparagraphs exists'”.

For their part, the plaintiff countries, along with the WTO tribunals, dredged up copies of The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Strunk and White’s classic The Elements of Style, and Merriam-Webster’s Guide to Punctuation and Style, among other such sources, to undercut such claims.

But even though the plaintiffs’ complaints are stuck in international legal limbo, the U.S. decision to legitimize and play this game has resulted in an international organization still proclaiming, without challenge, its absolute right to tell American leaders when they are or are not in a war (dictionary definitions are used as the ultimate standard), and even when they or any part of their national economy do and do not face an “international emergency” (a decision the panel specifically arrogates to WTO judges).

Dispositive substantive arguments can be raised against all the WTO tribunals’ conclusions. For example, as stated above, ensuring a nation’s security adequately is a challenge that doesn’t only arise during especially fraught times in international politics. It typically requires steps taken during more tranquil periods to ensure that military capabilities are adequate the moment trouble starts. WTO rules that prevent these measures from being taken until crises break out could simply ensure that they’re not in effect in time for the United States to prevail.

Yet making these points amounts to falling into the same trap into which the Biden administration’s trade litigators ensnared themselves and the country. Instead, Washington should both make emphatically clear that once U.S. authorities justify a trade-restricting measure, the WTO is irrelevant (as the Biden administration eventually declared) and then boycott whatever proceedings are convened.

Plaintiff countries would still be free to try to address these problems either through standard bilateral diplomacy, or counter-measures of their own, or some combination of the two, and let the party with the most leverage come out on top. Trade purists dismiss these practices as descending into a dangerous economic “law of the jungle,” but the United States and the European Union resorted to just this approach to resolve a long dispute about aircraft production subsidies outside WTO auspices. And freed of the cumbersome and inflexible adversarial framework imposed by the trade body’s legalistic procedures, they reached an agreement that satisfied all major stakeholders – including U.S. unions.

Handling these disputes bilaterally will strongly tend to produce lasting results and work in the U.S.’ favor because (a) agreements will reflect real world power balances – not the rulings of a system whose only raison d’etre is to define power out of existence in favor of an abstract equitism that’s completely divorced from global circumstances on the ground – and (b) because the United States enjoys an abundance of such power.

That the globalist Biden administration is acting as willing as the America First-y Trump administration to recognize that, at least when it comes to national security, tinternational trade law is “an idiot” (to quote Dickens) signals an encouragingly fundamental turn in America’s approach to the global economy. Even better would be for the President to make the break as clean and unmistakable as possible.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Ukraine Crisis Update

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allies, Antony Blinken, Biden, China, Germany, international law, NATO, natural gas, Nord Stream 2, North Atlantic treaty Organization, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, sanctions, spheres of influence, Taiwan, Ukraine

The Russia-Ukraine crisis at this point looks like a good news/bad news story – except as was the case when I posted last on the subject, the bad news still looks more important.

The good news: It’s now clear that President Biden knows how dangerously loony it would be to oppose a Russian invasion of Ukraine or intensification of hybrid war against the former Soviet republic with U.S. military forces.

Last Wednesday, he told reporters that putting “U.S. troops on the ground…in or around Ukraine to stop an invasion” was “not on the table” – at least “right now.” And despite that qualifier, he said three days later that this idea was never “on the table.”

That’s good news because, as I explained a week ago, geography makes Ukraine completely indefensible against Russia with conventional weapons, and largely as a result, it’s all too easy to imagine scenarios in which a President would face heavy pressure to rescue endangered American units with nuclear weapons use, which would almost certainly prompt a similar response by Moscow that could also easily escalate to a full-scale nuclear conflict. Worse, this risk would be run on behalf of a country that was never deemed anywhere remotely resembling a U.S. vital interest even during the Cold War.

Potentially better news: At least according to this Associated Press (AP) report, Mr. Biden is considering accommodating Russia’s stated security concerns about Ukraine and its relationship to the West – to the point of pressing “Ukraine to formally cede a measure of autonomy within its eastern Donbas region, which is now under de facto control by Russia-backed separatists who rose up against Kyiv in 2014” and reportedly telling Ukraine that “NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] membership is unlikely to be approved in the next decade….”

It’s not yet clear whether such steps would be enough to appease Russia – which has demanded a formal guarantee on the NATO issue, among others. And the AP report, which looks like a standard Washington trial balloon, doesn’t exactly square with Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s public insistence yesterday that “One country can’t exert a sphere of influence over others.”

But the evident decision of Biden administration officials to float compromise ideas along with the President’s ruling out of military options at least signals a welcome American awareness that its leverage and stakes in this part of the world are severely limited, and that ringing declarations of support for principles like “international law” and “territorial integrity” can often create more and more serious problems than they solve.

As also mentioned at the start, however, the Ukraine news isn’t all good. My first ongoing concern: President Biden is still talking about responding to an invasion of Ukraine by sending “more American and NATO troops into the [alliance’s] eastern flank…where we have a sacred obligation — to defend [those countries] against any attack by Russia.”

Mr. Biden is correct about U.S. treaty obligations. But as I wrote last week, this move, which could deploy large numbers of western forces very close to large numbers of Russian forces, is also a great recipe for an accidental war that, like a deliberately entered conflict, could go nuclear.

The administration and the U.S. main allies (see, e.g., here) are calling economic sanctions against Russia the main focus of their retaliatory plans, and that’s certainly less dangerous, at least in the short run, than military steps. But for two teasons, that doesn’t mean “completely safe.” First, these economic measures could push Russia and China closer together (as I mentioned last week). And as I didn’t mention, but was worried about nonetheless, such an alliance, or quasi-alliance, creates the possibility of the United States fighting two simultaneous wars against two formidable military powers – over Ukraine and over Taiwan.

It would be comforting to think that the President and his advisors are worried about this prospect, too, and further, recognize that unlike Ukraine, Taiwan’s security has become a U.S. vital interest because of its world leadership in semiconductor manufacturing technology. But even despite Mr. Biden’s reported interest in accommodating important Russia-related Ukraine concerns, I wish I saw more and more public signs of such priority-setting.

Second, I’m not so sure that all of America’s European allies would go along with all or even most of the U.S. sanctions. After all, with the worst of winter still surely on the way, they depend heavily on Russian exports of natural gas. And Germany, in particular, seems determined to increase this reliance ith its involvement in constructing the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

Berlin seems to be having second thoughts about this project. But Ukraine has officially accused Germany of blocking some of NATO’s efforts to supply it with weapons supplies. So it’s anyone’s guess where the policy of Germany’s new government is actually headed. And unfortunately, that’s my main conclusion so far about the Biden administration’s approach, too.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Biden’s Aides Show How Not to Deal with China

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Alaska, Antony J. Blinken, Asia-Pacific, Barack Obama, Biden, China, Donald Trump, global norms, globalism, Hong Kong, human rights, Indo-Pacific, international law, Jake Sullivan, liberal global order, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Reinhold Niebuhr, sanctions, Serenity Prayer, South China Sea, Taiwan, tariffs, tech, Trade, Uighurs, United Nations, Yang Jiechi

You knew (at least I did) that America’s top foreign policy officials were going to step in it when they led off their Alaska meeting yesterday with Chinese counterparts by describing U.S. policy toward the People’s Republic as first and foremost a globalist exercise in strengthening “the rules-based international order” rather than protecting and advancing Americas’ own specific national interests.

This emphasis on the part of Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan simultaneously made clear that they had no clue on how to communicate effectively to the Chinese or about China’s own aims, and – as was worrisomely true for the Obama administration in which both served – unwittingly conveyed to Beijing that they were more concerned about dreaming up utopian global arrangements than about dealing with the United States’ own most pressing concerns in the here and now.

It’s true that, in his opening remarks at the public portion of yesterday’s event that Blinken initially refered to advancing “the interests of the United States.” But his focus didn’t stay there for long. He immediately pivoted to contending:

“That system is not an abstraction. It helps countries resolve differences peacefully, coordinate multilateral efforts effectively and participate in global commerce with the assurance that everyone is following the same rules. The alternative to a rules-based order is a world in which might makes right and winners take all, and that would be a far more violent and unstable world for all of us. Today, we’ll have an opportunity to discuss key priorities, both domestic and global, so that China can better understand our administration’s intentions and approach.”

Where, however, has been the evidence over…decades that China views the contemporary world as one in which peaceful resolution of differences is standard operating procedure, much less desirable? That multilateral efforts are worth coordinating effectively? That might shouldn’t make right and that China shouldn’t “take all” whenever it can?

Even more important, where is the evidence that China views what globalists like Blinken view as a system to be legitimate in the first place? Indeed, Yang Jiechi, who in real terms outranks China’s foreign minister as the country’s real foreign affairs czar, countered just a few minutes later by dismissing Blinken’s “so-called rules-based international order” as a selfish concoction of “a small number of countries.” He specifically attacked it for enabling the United States in particular to “excercise long-arm jurisdiction and suppression” and “overstretch the national security through the use of force or financial hegemony….”

Shortly afterwards, he added, “I don’t think the overwhelming majority of countries in the world would recognize…that the rules made by a small number of people would serve as the basis for the international order.”

Yang touted as a superior alternative “the United Nations-centered international system and the international order underpinned by international law.” But of course, even if you swallow this Chinese line (and you shouldn’t), it’s been precisely that system’s universality, and resulting need to pretend the existence of an equally universal consensus on acceptable behavior and good faith on the part of all members, that’s resulted in its general uselessness.

Meanwhile, surely striking Beijing as both cynical and utterly hollow were Blinken’s efforts to justify U.S. criticisms of China’s human rights abuses as threats to “the rules-based order that maintains global stability. That’s why they’re not merely internal matters and why we feel an obligation to raise these issues here today.”

After all, whatever any decent person thinks of Beijing’s contemptible crackdown in Hong Kong, arguably genocidal campaigns against the Uighur minority, and brutally totalitarian system generally, what genuinely serious person could believe that the United States, or other democracies, had any intention or capability of halting these practices?

What might have made an actually useful, and credible, impression on the Chinese from a U.S. standpoint would have been blunt declarations that (a) Beijing’s saber-rattling toward (global semiconductor manufacturing leader) Taiwan and sealanes-jeopardizing expansionism in the South China Sea, and cyber-attacks were major threats to American security and prosperity that the United States would keep responding to with all means necessary; and (b) that Washington would continue using a full-range of tariffs and sanctions against predatory Chinese economic practices as long as they continued harming U.S. businesses and their employees. That is, Blinken and Sullivan should have emphasized Chinese actions that hurt and endanger Americans – and against which in the economic sphere, Donald Trump’s policies showed Washington could make a significant difference.

It’s possible that in the private sessions, President Biden’s emissaries will dispense with the grandstanding and zero in on the basics. (Although that shift would raise the question of why this approach was deemed unsuitable for the public.) But the Biden-ites weirdly advertised in advance that China’s economic abuses and the technology development threat it poses wouldn’t be U.S. priorities at any stage of the Alaska meetings.

In the mid-20^th century, American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr popularized (although probably didn’t write) a devotion called the “Serenity Prayer” whose famous first lines read “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” I’m hoping someone puts copies into Blinken’s and Sullivan’s briefcases for their flight back from Alaska.

Im-Politic: How Mexico’s Paying for the Border Wall After All

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AMLO, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, asylum seekers, border security, border wall, caravans, Central America, illegal immigration, Im-Politic, immigrants, Immigration, international law, Jorge Ramos, Mexico, Migrant Protection Protocols, migrants, The New York Times, Trump

Here’s quite the spectacular new entry in the “Life is Strange” category: President Trump has turned out to be right in predicting that Mexico would pay for a border wall to curb illegal immigration. Only this victory has taken a form that neither Mr. Trump nor anyone else could have possibly expected. It didn’t even totally entail developments at the border envisioned!

It’s a major win nonetheless, and if you doubt me, then take the word of Jorge Ramos, the well known anchor for Spanish language TV network Univision, a major champion of de facto Open Borders policies, and of course no fan of the President’s. 

For as Ramos has pointed out in a New York Times op-ed piece yesterday, Mexico has created at least the functional equivalent of a wall. He’s referring to the decision (forced by a very effective – though of course widely condemned – tariffs and border-closing threat by Mr. Trump, as Ramos ruefully observed) of Mexico’s new President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (nicknamed “AMLO”) to use Mexican forces to prevent Central American migrants and various other supposed asylum seekers from entering the United States en masse. Nor has Ramos been the only mass immigration advocate to point out this specific Trump success.

Some of these Mexican National Guards personnel are helping the United States enforce its new policy that permits requiring many asylum seekers to stay in Mexico while their cases are judged. This Migrant Protection Protocols program replaces the obligation created by international law that until now has been interpreted to rquire Washington to admit  U.S.-bound asylum seekers’ entry even before evaluation. Although motivated by entirely understandable humanitarian concerns, this measure never anticipated the type of mass migration and related asylum fraud situation faced by the United States nowadays.

Other Mexican National Guards have been deployed to the country’s southern border with Guatemala, where they’ve been unmistakably effective in preventing huge caravans of Central American migrants from traveling through Mexico to reach the U.S.-Mexico border.

The United States has been indirectly financing a small portion of these efforts (through training programs to help for Central American officials better control their own borders). But the vast majority of spending on these efforts is coming from Mexico.

The President is entirely correct in continuing to emphasize the need for more effective physical barriers at the U.S.-Mexico border. But the essence of his famous campaign wall-building promise was to improve America’s own border security greatly, and to make Mexico pay the costs. And that’s exactly what’s now happening to a major extent. Even better – this approach is working. Illegal crossings at the U.S. border are down, and Mexico’s Lopez Obrador says that the migrants groups seeking to enter his country are shrinking.

President Trump has been supplied with abundant material for reelection campaign ads this week (notably, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s ripping up of her ceremonial State of the Union transcript). Jorge Ramos’ op-ed has just given him some more.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Why Opposition to the September 11 Law is Completely Stupid

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Bob Corker, energy, foreign policy establishment, international law, lobbying, Middle East, Mitch McConnell, Obama, oil, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Paul Ryan, Saudi Arabia, September 11, September 11 bill, sovereign immunity, terrorism

Thanks to foreign policy establishmentarians on the Left and Right, ranging from President Obama to Congress’ Republican leaders, we’ve just gotten a moment when the folks we’ve entrusted to chart our country’s course in world affairs have not only gotten something massively wrong, but literally stopped thinking.

I’m talking about reactions to Congress’ override of the president’s veto of the September 11 bill, which will now enable the families of American victims of terrorism on U.S. soil to seek legal damages from foreign governments found to be responsible. Sure, all or most of the misgivings being expressed by figures like House Speaker Paul Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Bob Corker could be resulting from lavish campaign contributions they’ve received from Washington’s big Saudi Arabia lobby. (I have no concrete evidence of this, but the Saudis have always been major Beltway players, and they’re one of the governments sure to be sued under the new law.)

But what’s most revealing about the concerns and outright fears being expressed is their content. For the counter-arguments now being made – and made all along by the Obama administration – reflect jaw-dropping misunderstandings about geopolitics and the role of international law in international relations that have practically defined mainstream foreign policy thinking across the American political spectrum.

Two in particular stand out, and they’re related to the principle objection to the September 11 law: If American citizens can now bring court cases against foreign governments, in violation of the longstanding international legal principle of sovereign immunity, then foreign citizens will feel free to file all sorts of lawsuits against the U.S. government and its representatives at home and abroad.

First, though, does anyone really think that it’s international law that keeps American diplomats and official Washington safe from the reach of foreign legal systems (and the flagrant pseudo-legal systems found in so many countries – including Saudi Arabia)? If they do, they shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the American foreign policy decision-making process.

What has really ensured these results is the shield that has always been America’s most reliable asset: American power in all its forms. This should be obvious when it comes to countries considered allies – since the United States is so inherently secure and prosperous that it needs them militarily and geopolitically much less than they need America. Indeed, if any allies are now considering or have ever even contemplated legally harassing American diplomats for any reason, that would count as a disgraceful failure of U.S. policymaking.

And P.S., that goes double for Saudi Arabia. In case the foreign policy establishment hasn’t noticed, even leaving aside the abundant support for Al Qaeda and other Islamic extremists influential Saudis have provided for decades, the days when the United States and the rest of the world needed to tremble at the thought that Riyadh might push through a big oil price hike or even shut off the spigots ended long ago. Even better, that’s mainly because of the energy production revolution in the United States.

So although Saudi retaliation for the September 11 bill might unnerve its hired guns in Washington, the United States is fully capable of telling its government, “Enjoy fighting Iran by yourself.”

Second, fears about a new global wave of anti-American lawsuits stupidly assume that most and even all foreign governments will react in the same way. The worrywarts don’t seem to understand that the September 11 bill only permits suits against foreign governments accused of supporting terrorism in the United States. Is this new law really likely to worry the British? Or the Japanese? Or even the Chinese?

The September 11 bill fear-mongers aren’t normally the types to softpedal the differences between America’s friends and foes, or between democracies and dictatorships, or even between ordinary foreign governments of whatever stripe and rogue states. So what’s going on? Simply put, their analytical compasses and even bedrock common sense apparently have been thrown off by the assumption – so crucial to modern international law – that all sovereign governments are created equal and much be so treated legally. Therefore, September 11 bill opponents seem convinced that all sovereign governments can be counted on to act in the same way as well.

Dickens famously characterized the law as “an ass” when, as is the case from time to time, its precepts produce head-scratching decisions. But in countries with legal systems worthy of the name, those bloopers are rightly accepted as one price of seeking and enforcing equitable societies and the common standards of behavior they require.

But the international sphere lacks the ingredients needed for effective legal systems – i.e., consensus about those standards. And no such meeting of an adequate number international minds is remotely foreseeable. Therefore, the ludicrous controversy about the September 11 bill should be reminding us that in the foreign policy sphere, the law is especially asinine – and should have no meaningful influence on American decisions and actions.

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: How to Stop China’s Maritime Expansionism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Obama’s Potentially Dangerous Nonsense on Global Rules

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international cooperation, international law, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, power, United Nations

Usually, the most compelling criticisms of presidential speeches before the UN General Assembly are that they’re cynical exercises in idealistic rhetoric delivered for public relations purposes, and that they tell us almost nothing useful about a particular administration’s foreign policy. The most compelling criticism of President Obama’s latest speech before the UN General Assembly is very different: It seems likely that he really believes the platitudes he spouted about the need to conduct American diplomacy and international relations in general according to the rule of law. In the process, at least, Mr. Obama made abundantly clear why his own foreign policy record has been so ineffective.

The president’s brief for continuing to build “a system of international rules and norms that are better and stronger and more consistent” was impressively detailed. But it ignored all the big obstacles that have kept world affairs an endless and often bloody struggle for power and advantage. It presented no plausible ideas for getting the world from here to there. And it ignored the even more compelling reasons for the United States in particular to reject the president’s seemingly unimpeachable goals.

As Mr. Obama noted, the Hobbesian system he condemns has set the mold for world politics “for most of human history.” But he never even broached the question of “Why?” Had he been the slightest bit curious, he surely would have recognized that no effective system of global rules has ever existed in the security realm because the international sphere completely lacks the essential condition that makes meaningful legal systems possible in the first place: a strong consensus on what represents acceptable and unacceptable behavior.

Groups of individuals that develop this consensus are naturally able to create the two main defining characteristics of genuinely legal systems. First, they can turn this consensus into a set of specific do’s and don’ts that apply equally to all, regardless of power, wealth, or status. Second, they can agree on procedures to resolve disputes peacefully and figure out how to apply these rules to specific sets of circumstances when questions arise.

Although documents such as the UN Charter and the Declaration of Human Rights indicate that acceptable behavior has in fact been defined, the story of the post-World War II period shows that it’s a paper creation. In fact, no actual consensus whatever exists even on whether these principles should apply equally to all countries, much less on binding dispute-resolution mechanisms. And as President Obama should have noted, the United States has been one of the prime culprits. Along with the other major victors of World War II, it insisted that the UN accord them special status via creation of a Security Council in which each could veto any decision made by the organization even if every other member supported it.

But before you condemn that era’s American leaders for ending a new golden age of international law before it even began, ask yourself why Washington should have agreed to to permit its actions to be checked by any other countries or groups of countries. Should it have trusted in the superior wisdom or virtue of the Soviet Union? Of Britain and France, who were reeling economically and who were still struggling to maintain empires in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East? Of Latin American countries geographically isolated from most impending world crises, too poor and weak to make significant contributions to resolving them, and generally ruled by dictators?

Further, even if a respectable argument could be made for taking international consensus into account in a major way in American foreign policy-making, what’s the moral argument for deciding that the opinions and judgments of other government should always or usually trump that of the leaders elected by the American people? And what was the pragmatic argument for accepting this kind of system, given that the early postwar United States was amply capable of providing for its own security and prosperity?

Decades later, America’s relative power in world politics clearly has waned. But the nation is still more than able to ensure its safety and prosperity through its own devices, especially if it defines its major interests realistically. And who are the foreign intellectual and ethical paragons to which the U.S. government should defer today? Dictators like Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping? European leaders who keep shirking their appropriate share of the common western defense burden, and who are always happy to do business with rogue states in apparent confidence that American can always be trusted to deal with any dangers that emerge? Third world countries ruled by various kinds of autocrats and/or dependent on various forms of U.S. and other foreign aid?

Equally mysterious: How would Mr. Obama proceed to create a global legal system out of the chaos that exists today, and which his own words indicate has taken a turn for the worse lately? His rhetoric – including this speech – continually reveals a conviction that expelling power considerations from world politics would benefit all countries, even the large ones. But where is the evidence that he’s making converts? Is he considering setting an example by voluntarily yielding America’s prerogatives in the UN and other international organizations? Does he want the UN Secretary-General to serve as some kind of de facto or de jure world president? Does he have someone or something else in mind? And if, as appears, he has no blueprint, why should anyone take his words seriously?

But at least those questions are hypothetical. Another big question surrounding the president’s approach to foreign policy constantly comes up in the here and now, and needs to be answered satisfactorily for anyone to have any legitimate faith in his diplomacy: Does he recognize that mustering superior power and wealth is necessary for American success even in dealing with those threats he rightly noted “no nation…can insulate itself from”? From all appearances, the answer is “No,” and this failure to understand that national wherewithal must be available and applied even to meet shared global challenges raises the prospect that America’s legitimate interests will get rolled repeatedly.

Here’s why. It’s true that “the risk of financial contagion; the flow of migrants, or the danger of a warming planet,” and similar problems, potentially affect all countries, and create powerful incentives for cooperation. But the president seems to have no clear idea of how that cooperation gets created. Hopefully, he isn’t counting on some group of allegedly disinterested experts to come up with answers so brilliant that all governments will simply acknowledge their merits. It seems evident that he’s not counting on the rest of the world to believe that the United States will come up with ideal solutions on its own. So how does he propose to achieve any progress?

My distinct impression is that he has no such strategy here, either, and that he’s overlooking the reality that the highly diverse states that comprise the international sphere bring to all negotiations and other cooperative endeavors different historical experiences, cultural traditions, locations, and economic strengths and weaknesses. As a result, they (including the United States) inevitably are going to define acceptable, let alone ideal, outcomes from their national standpoint in equally diverse ways, at least much of the time.

The possibility of persuasion can’t be ruled out in world politics. But in those many instances where the force of American ideas is not sufficient to prevail at the bargaining table, and where American preferences matter, the force of American force – and wealth – will be vital for increasing the odds that solutions significantly reflect American interests and preferences. Therefore, whether sticks or carrots are used most often, it should be evident that those countries with the most wherewithal will be able to use those devices most effectively, and that consequently maximizing power in all of its usable dimensions needs to be among the nation’s top foreign policy priorities.

In a country with representative, accountable government, one of the most important functions that leaders can serve is educational – not in a high handed, lecturing sense, but in terms of identifying plausible, desirable objectives, the trade-offs involved in achieving or forgoing them, and the pluses and minuses of various available policy tools. With his oratorical gifts and his smarts, Mr. Obama’s potential to play this role was undeniable. That’s why it’s so tragic that he’s chosen, in so many of his big-think exercises in foreign affairs, to propagate myths and homilies that are not only gauzy and empty, but potentially dangerous.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Desperately Seeking Real Retrenchment

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Afghanistan, American exceptionalism, Asia-Pacific, Baltic states, Bashir Al-Assad, boots on the ground, Charles Lanes, chemical weapons, defense budget, defense spending, Earl Ravenal, George W. Bush, international law, Iraq, ISIS, isolationism, Middle East, multilateralism, national interests, NATO, Nixon Doctrine, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, pivot, Poland, Richard Nixon, Russia, sequestration, Soviet Union, Stephen Sestanovich, Syria, Ukraine, Vietnam War, vital interests, Vladimir Putin, Washington Post

Washington Post columnist Charles Lane has just done an excellent job of demonstrating how powerfully universalist America’s bipartisan foreign policy establishment remains – even as powerful reasons keep multiplying for climbing down from this wildly ambitious approach.

According to Lane, a new book by former American diplomat and Columbia University political scientist Stephen Sestanovich bears out President Obama’s claim to be a kindred spirit with Richard M. Nixon as a “retrenchment” president – one of the chief executives who has sought to “correct the perceived overreaching of their predecessors and free up U.S. resources for domestic concerns.” In fact, says Lane, Sestanovich has written that post-World War II U.S. foreign policy has been marked by a “constant pendulum-swing between administrations that aggressively pursued U.S. goals abroad” (who the author calls “maximalists”) and those Nixon- and Obama-style retrenchers.

I hate to comment on books I haven’t yet read. But Lane’s description of Mr. Nixon and Mr. Obama both qualify as retrenchers reveals a mindset so enthusiastic about massive and potentially open-ended U.S. involvement in literally every corner of the world if necessary that it sees even talk about a more discriminating approach as a major departure.

Judging by the record, it hasn’t been. In fact, both the Nixon talk and the Obama talk about retrenchment have been overwhelmingly that – talk. Just as important, and closely related, what have arguably looked at least superficially like exercises in retrenchment have in fact been exercises in wishful thinking. Both presidents have actually agreed that the security, stability, and even prosperity of the entire world are U.S. vital interests. They’ve simply differed with the maximalists in insisting that these interests can be defended through means that are less dangerous and violent, and more globally popular, than the unilateral U.S. use of military force.

To cite the leading historical example, the ballyhooed Nixon Doctrine of 1970 was never a decision to cross Vietnam or any part of Asia off the list of vital U.S. interests – those whose defense was thought essential for maintaining America’s own security and prosperity. As explained initially by Earl C. Ravenal shortly after the Doctrine’s declaration, Mr. Nixon had decided, in the absence of any evidence, that this vital set of objectives could be defended without an early resort to U.S. military involvement – chiefly, by the militaries of America’s regional allies.

Therefore, Ravenal wrote:

“the Administration’s new policies and decision processes do not bring about the proposed balance [between the country’s foreign policy ends and the means to be used to attain them]; in fact, they create a more serious imbalance. Essentially we are to support the same level of potential involvement with smaller conventional forces. The specter of intervention will remain, but the risk of defeat or stalemate will be greater; or the nuclear threshold will be lower.”

President Obama has given us a different version of such dangerous wishful thinking. More accurately, he’s given us several different versions. His original 2008 candidacy for the White House was largely motivated by a conviction that the overly unilateralist and militaristic tendencies of George W. Bush had produced disaster in Iraq, and were actually undermining U.S. security by damaging America’s international image.

That’s why Mr. Obama focused so much attention on repairing that image. He never indicated that he would scale back that list of U.S. vital interests. He simply suggested that they could be better defended if need be by acting multilaterally, with international approval, rather than by going it alone. And he conveyed the clear impression that challenges could be prevented in the first place if only America became more popular in regions like the Middle East.

Once in office, Mr. Obama did try to establish a hierarchy of U.S. worldwide interests that would have operational impact. He decided that the nation had been so preoccupied with Middle East wars that it had been neglected the Asia-Pacific region, which he considered at least as important. So he launched a “pivot” that would transfer some American forces from the former to the latter.

But the president never apparently judged the Middle East to be less important to America’s fate. He simply concluded that, with the Afghanistan and Iraq wars supposedly winding down, it had become less dangerous. Having been proven wrong by the rise of ISIS. in Afghanistan, he’s (gradually) boosting the American military presence in region again. The president is claiming, moreover – based on as little evidence as Mr. Nixon required – that any remaining capabilities gap can be filled by the armed forces of regional countries. Worse, many of his Republican critics, who are just as reluctant to deploy many more U.S. “boots on the ground,” agree with Mr. Obama’s fundamental assessment.

Further, the president has actually expanded the list of circumstances in the Middle East (and presumably elsewhere) that should justify American military responses – the kinds of chemical weapons attacks launched by Bashir Al-Assad against Syrians revolting against his dictatorship, along with similar major violations of international law.  (This effort, so far, has not yet won over the public.)

Nor does that exhaust Mr. Obama’s efforts to lengthen the list of U.S. vital interests. He has understandably responded to Russia’s recent provocations against allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) by strengthening U.S. forces and deploying them more conspicuously in new NATO members like Poland and the Baltic states, former Soviet satellites clearly in Moscow’s line of fire. Less understandable have been the Obama administration’s numerous suggestions that the security of Ukraine, too, is a matter of urgent American concern – even though this country was actually part of the old Soviet Union for decades with no apparent effects on U.S. safety or well-being.

Yet like the debate over countering ISIS, that over dealing with Vladimir Putin spotlights one major difference between President Obama and his (mainly) Republican foreign policy critics: Many of them have strongly backed big boosts in the U.S. military budget (if not always using these forces), including aggressive moves to circumvent spending caps established by the sequestration process. Mr. Obama has not sought comparable increases.

The president unquestionably has often spoken in terms that seem to support a smaller U.S. role in the world – e.g., his remarks suggesting that America’s exceptionalism isn’t all that exceptional, and reminding that much of the world has legitimate historical grievances against the West, and in some cases against the United States specifically. But his strategic walk has never matched this talk, and the continuing flood of contentions to the contrary in the punditocracy and even academe (if Lane’s Post column is accurate) plainly are serving their (partly) intended purpose of preventing searching debate on foreign policy fundamentals.

Given the nation’s resulting over-extension militarily, therefore, when the chattering class powers-that-be start labeling presidents or most other politicians as retrenchers or minimalists (an improvement to be sure over the hackneyed charge of “isolatonism”), the only legitimate reaction is a thoroughly exasperated, “If only.”