Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Why Kissinger is Wrong About the CCP Virus and Geopolitics

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America First, Carl von Clausewitz, CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, export bans, globalism, globalization, health security, Henry Kissinger, international organizations, liberal global order, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, realism, The Wall Street Journal, travel ban, Wuhan virus

As I’ve written previously on RealityChek, I’m a big Henry Kissinger fan. Not that I haven’t strongly, and even vehemently disagreed with the former Secretary of State and White House national security adviser on numerous issues. But I’ve considered his experience making foreign policy and studying its history to be orders of magnitude more impressive than anyone else on the national and worldwide diplomatic scenes for decades, and so believe that everything he writes deserves to be taken seriously.

And that’s why I found his recent Wall Street Journal article on the implications of the CCP Virus outbreak for U.S. foreign policy and global geopolitics so disappointing. For it differs little from the standard globalist drivel that’s been regurgitated lately about how the pandemic once again shows the need for more international cooperation and stronger international institutions because it’s one of those threats that “doesn’t respect borders.”

To be sure, Kissinger has always been quite the globalist himself in many ways, differing mainly with this foreign policy approach by insisting that American leaders can never forget the realities or power and other globally divisive forces responsible for how conflict has dominated world history. But the Journal essay is completely devoid of Kissinger’s characteristic efforts to integrate the kind of foreign policy “realism” with which, on the one hand, he’s been (simplistically) associated, and what genuine realists (and America Firsters like me) regard as the kumbaya-saturated means and ends of globalism on the other.

The author’s goal of transitioning to a global “post-coronavirus order” is quintessential Kissinger – who has long believed much more than other globalists that creating and preserving a substantial degree of international stability is essential to what all supporters of this school of thought have recognized as the imperative of preventing war between the great powers – especially in a nuclear age. (For a fuller explanation of the differences among these various foreign policy approaches, see this 2018 article of mine.)

But Kissinger’s essay is devoid of his characteristic attempts to integrate even his highly qualified brand of realism (let alone a more – in my opinion – hardheaded America First strategy) with the globalist insistence that major conflict is best prevented by addressing its supposedly underlying economic and social causes.

As a result, Kissinger emphasizes that “No country, not even the U.S., can in a purely national effort overcome the virus.” And that the current crisis “must ultimately be coupled with a global collaborative vision and program.” And that the “principles of the liberal world order” must be “safeguarded.” And that, in particular, nations must resist the temptation to revive the ambition of retreating behind walls because nowadays, prosperity depends on global trade and movement of people.

The problem, as I’ve pointed out in the article linked above, is that even a strategy focused on such global cooperation and other goals needs to understand that, because there remain great differences among countries on how best to achieve them, and in some important instances on the goals themselves, only power (in both military and economic forms) ultimately can guarantee any country that its preferred approaches and ambitions will prevail. And that even goes for working within international institutions. To paraphrase the great 19^th century Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz, working with international organizations is nothing but the continuation of power politics with other means.

Nor is there any acknowledgement in Kissinger’s piece of the United States’ unique capacity for self-sufficiency in both producing heathcare-related goods and developing vaccines and cures for diseases, or for the unmistakable need greatly to strengthen this capacity given the literally dozens of export bans imposed on drugs and drug ingredients and medical devices and protective equipment by countries that do normally sell them overseas. And as for Kissinger’s reference to the importance of global travel, yes…but look at all the countries that have imposed restrictions on travel from China alone.

Kissinger ends his article by citing U.S. policy after World War II as an example of the kind of enlightened course Washington should pursue because of its clear success in “growing prosperity and [enhancing] human dignity.” But as that postwar era dawned, the United States was so globally predominant in terms of material power that it could afford to finance for decades most of the effort needed to achieve these goals without undercutting its own position. And of course more than half that postwar world wound up organizing itself in opposition. In other words, it seems that Kissinger has forgotten one of the main lessons learned by all truly great historians – that the past rarely repeats itself exactly, or even very close.

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Our So-Called Foreign Policy: More Childish Attacks on Trump

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alliances, allies, Council on Foreign Relations, foreign policy establishment, George H.W. Bush, Greece, IMF, International Monetary Fund, international organizations, internationalism, Iran deal, JCPOA, Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, journalists, Mainstream Media, media, military bases, NAFTA, New Zealand, North American Free Trade Agreement, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Paris climate accord, Philippines, Richard N. Haass, Ronald Reagan, TPP, Trans-Pacific Partnership, Trump, UN, UNESCO, United Nations, Withdrawal Doctrine, World Bank, World Trade Organization, WTO

I’m getting to think that in an important way it’s good that establishment journalists and foreign policy think tank hacks still dominate America’s debate on world affairs. It means that for the foreseeable future, we’ll never run out of evidence of how hidebound, juvenile, and astonishingly ignorant these worshipers of the status quo tend to be. Just consider the latest fad in their ranks: the narrative that the only theme conferring any coherence on President Trump’s foreign policy is his impulse to pull the United States out of alliances and international organizations, or at least rewrite them substantially.

This meme was apparently brewed up at the heart of the country’s foreign policy establishment – the Council on Foreign Relations. Its president, former aide to Republican presidents Richard N. Haass, tweeted on October 12, “Trump foreign policy has found its theme: The Withdrawal Doctrine. US has left/threatening to leave TPP, Paris accord, Unesco, NAFTA, JCPOA.” [He’s referring here to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal that aimed to link the U.S. economy more tightly to East Asian and Western Hemisphere countries bordering the world’s largest ocean; the global deal to slow down climate change; the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization; the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – the official name of the agreement seeking to deny Iran nuclear weapons.]

In a classic instance of group-think, this one little 140-character sentence was all it took to spur the claim’s propagation by The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Marketwatch.com, Vice.com, The Los Angeles Times, and Britain’s Financial Times (which publishes a widely read U.S. edition).  For good measure, the idea showed up in The New Republic, too – albeit without mentioning Haass.

You’d have to read far into (only some of) these reports to see any mention that American presidents taking similar decisions is anything but unprecedented. Indeed, none of them reminded readers of one of the most striking examples of alliance disruption from the White House: former President Ronald Reagan’s decision to withdraw American defense guarantees to New Zealand because of a nuclear weapons policy dispute. Moreover, the administrations of Reagan and George H.W. Bush engaged in long, testy negotiations with long-time allies the Philippines and Greece on renewing basing agreements that involved major U.S. cash payments.

Just as important, you could spend hours on Google without finding any sense in these reports that President Trump has decided to remain in America’s major security alliances in Europe and Asia, as well as in the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (along with a series of multilateral regional development banks).

More important, you’d also fail to find on Google to find any indication that any of the arrangements opposed by Mr. Trump might have less than a roaring success. The apparent feeling in establishment ranks is that it’s not legitimate for American leaders to decide that some international arrangements serve U.S. interests well, some need to be recast, and some are such failures or are so unpromising that they need to be ditched or avoided in the first place.

And the reason that such discrimination is so doggedly opposed is that, the internationalist world affairs strategy pursued for decades by Presidents and Congresses across the political spectrum (until, possibly, now) is far from a pragmatic formula for dealing with a highly variegated, dynamic world. Instead, it’s the kind of rigid dogma that’s most often (and correctly) associated with know-it-all adolescents and equally callow academics. What else but an utterly utopian ideology could move a writer from a venerable pillar of opinion journalism (the aforementioned Atlantic) to traffick in such otherworldly drivel as

“A foreign-policy doctrine of withdrawal also casts profound doubt on America’s commitment to the intricate international system that the United States helped create and nurture after World War II so that countries could collaborate on issues that transcend any one nation.”

Without putting too fine a point on it, does that sound like the planet you live on?

I have no idea whether whatever changes President Trump is mulling in foreign policy will prove effective or disastrous, or turn out to be much ado about very little. I do feel confident in believing that the mere fact of rethinking some foreign policy fundamentals makes his approach infinitely more promising than one that views international alliances and other arrangements in all-or-nothing terms; that evidently can’t distinguish the means chosen to advance U.S. objectives from the objectives themselves; and that seems oblivious to the reality that the international sphere lacks the characteristic that makes prioritizing institution’s creation and maintenance not only possible in the domestic sphere, but indispensable – a strong consensus on defining acceptable and unacceptable behavior.

One of the most widely (and deservedly) quoted adages about international relations is the observation, attributed to a 19^th century British foreign minister, that his nation had “no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.” Until America’s foreign policy establishment and its media mouthpieces recognize that this advice applies to international institutions, too, and start understanding the implications, they’ll keep losing influence among their compatriots. And rightly so.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Putting the “Dip” in U.S. Diplomacy

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bailouts, Brazil, China, China meltdown, China stock markets, CNN, Congress, coupling, decoupling, Denise Labott, emerging markets, Exim, Export-Import Bank, export-led growth, free trade agreements, global leadership, Hillary Clinton, IMF, International Monetary Fund, international organizations, Iran, Iran deal, Jackie Calmes, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, The New York Times, TPP, Trans-Pacific Partnership, Wendy Sherman

It was unintentional to be sure, but the establishment media should get some credit for providing the following two reminders of how positively dippy American foreign policy, and the analysis of this diplomacy, has become.

The latest came just yesterday, in New York Times correspondent Jackie Calmes’ article titled “I.M.F. Breakthrough Is Seen to Bolster U.S. on World Stage.” And in the likely case that Calmes isn’t responsible for the headline, the thrust of the piece is clear from the lead paragraph:

“A string of agreements between the White House and Congress, capped by last month’s surprise accord that ended a five-year impasse over the International Monetary Fund [IMF] has eased, though not dispelled, concern that America is retreating from global economic leadership.”

I’ve already explained here and here (among other places) why Calmes decision to include on this list Mr. Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal and Congress’ decision to restore to life the Export-Import Bank makes no sense. So I’ll concentrate on the development she focuses on: Congress’ agreement to approve reform of the International Monetary Fund that grants more voting power to so-called “emerging market” (EM) countries like Russia, India, and especially China.

The IMF decision itself is idiotic enough. The rationale – supported by virtually every other member of the Fund – has been that these countries represent the rising powers in the global economic system, and therefore deserve more clout in one of the international organizations charged with overseeing this system. The trouble is, these countries’ wherewithal was greatly exaggerated even when they were growing strongly. The main reason is that their growth depended heavily on exporting to wealthier countries like the United States.

They’re still largely export-dependent, but rather than global growth leaders, they’ve become global growth laggards. Brazil, for example, is facing the prospect of its worst recession in more than a century. On top of its geopolitical trouble-making, Russia’s an economic mess. And China looks not only to be slowing dramatically, but completely incompetent in regulating its financial markets (not to mention its own aggressive regional moves). Even acknowledging that the United States, the European Union countries, and Japan haven’t been economic standouts either for many years, what’s the merit case now for augmenting these countries’ international influence?

But Calmes’ thesis is inane on many more fundamental levels, too. Chiefly, it parrots a series of commonplaces that, though endlessly repeated by mainstream foreign policy analysts and the politicians that bewilderingly still listen to them, keep undermining the effectiveness of American diplomacy. They start with the idea that the IMF, or any other international organization, has counted for much in world affairs. These institutions are logistically useful in providing fora (i.e., “buildings”) in which leading powers that communicate, negotiate, and otherwise deal with each other. But they have no autonomous ability to affect the course of events.

The Fund is often seen as an exception even by avowedly realist thinkers who normally take a dim view of international organizations, but contrary to Calmes’ claim, it per se has never served as “an international lender of last resort to foster global stability.” After all, it has no capacity to create wealth or other resources. In the last analysis, its lending function has always been carried out by the United States and the other major powers, who have used the Fund as a conduit. For two decades starting in the 1970s, the Fund addressed a series of financial crises in developing countries with a series of bailouts (again, financed ultimately by its members) that were conditioned on economic reform programs. But even the Fund’s staff now acknowledges that much of the advice it dispensed was lousy.

And since institutions like the Fund don’t serve as significant force multipliers for strong, wealthy countries like the United States, they’re anything but indispensable for American world leadership, economic or otherwise. As with the case of all countries aspiring to this goal, that flows from America’s own capabilities. Indeed, given America’s still crucial role as the world’s market and consumer of last resort, we’ll know that its economic leadership is at risk when its trade partners figure out another way to grow adequately.

Finally, there’s the question of whether the United States needs world leadership in the first place. I’ve explained in detail why a country this strong, wealthy, and geographically secure can remain more-than-adequately safe and prosperous even in a deeply troubled world. Indeed, America’s matchless capacity for self-sufficiency nowadays argues for less of what foreign policy types call world leadership by Washington – and therefore less exposure to the world’s woes – not more. I’m not saying that these views are beyond criticism. I am saying that they were worth debating even during the Cold War, they’re worth debating more now, and it’s dismaying that no one relying on Calmes or her Mainstream Media counterparts for their news in 2016 would have a clue that it’s not still 1956 strategically.

The second example of foreign policy dippiness came during the summer, from CNN’s Denise Labott’s August profile of Wendy Sherman, the chief staff-level U.S. negotiator of the nuclear weapons deal signed with Iran. Although I’m not enthusiastic about the agreement, I still view it as the best possible option available to America to keep Iran bomb-free short of military strikes. My confidence, however, has definitely been shaken having read Labott’s cheery revelation that “Her first career as a social worker and community organizer may seem like odd training for nuclear negotiations. But Sherman said she actually drew upon those experiences with her Iranian counterparts.”

Continued Labott : “Her ‘caseload’ may be more global, but she said the work is similar — involving the complex relationship and budding detente between Washington and Tehran, as well as managing a series of clients both inside and outside the meeting room.

“‘That skill set came in handy,’ she said. ‘You have to see all the parts in front of you. You really learn how to understand people.'”

Meaning no disrespect for the profession, but I can’t think of a background less suitable than social work for dealing with regimes like Iran’s (or North Korea’s – which was a Sherman responsibility under former President Clinton). Unless you think that the ruthless mullahs in Tehran or the arguably sociopathic leadership in Pyongyang have anything in common with a troubled American individual or family? And that the assignment is providing relief?

From another standpoint, social work and comparable activity are defined by enhancing a client’s well-being. Self-interest doesn’t even enter the picture. Is that how Sherman viewed her priorities? At least judging from this article, that’s how it seems. And Labott apparently considered this nothing less than delightful.

An optimist could finish Labott’s profile relieved that Sherman is now esconced in the academic world. A pessimist, though, could note that she’s a close confidante of her former Foggy Bottom superior, Hillary Clinton, and that she’s being talked about as a possible Secretary of State herself should the Democratic front-runner win the White House.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Why Power Remains Paramount

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Brookings Institution, civil society, climate change, foreign policy, international cooperation, international law, international organizations, internationalism, James Traub, nation-states, non-state actors, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, poverty, power politics, Russia, terrorism, transnational threats

It’s tempting to conclude that nothing could be less important than a Brookings Institution conference on “International Peace and Cooperation in an Age of Global Competition” even if invitees did include “senior foreign policy officials, scholars, and experts from G-20 member states and other pivotal countries.” After all, why would representatives of foreign governments disclose to an audience comprised of representatives of other foreign governments anything of consequence that was previously unknown?

At the same time, what’s learned about such gabfests can usefully remind the rest of us plebeians how completely out to lunch these supposed luminaries tend to be – especially regarding the main questions and choices they think they face. So FOREIGN POLICY magazine contributor James Traub deserves a big shout out for reporting the gist of this off this record session. For his account (unwittingly, to be sure) strongly indicated that those assembled (presumably including some American leaders) have totally forgotten the key enduring truth about international affairs.

It’s a maxim that prevails even in these turbulent times, and indeed especially in these turbulent times: As long as the world contains multiple, independent forces or parties of any kind, their hopes for success (however defined) will depend overwhelmingly on their relative power.

According to Traub, the attendees were all but consumed with the question of whether world affairs are still dominated by the kinds of nation-states that emerged centuries ago, or by the bewildering array of non-state actors and forces that seem to be popping up everywhere nowadays, ranging from terrorists to religious movements to civil society groups to the simple “demand of ordinary people for a better life than their government now affords them.”

The author quite rightly notes the dramatically different sets of policy implications that flow, at least logically, from either answer: the former militating for continuing to seek advantage over rival states, and win and keep allies; the latter pointing to a new, more cooperative agenda of solving or at least ameliorating a series of common problems underlying growing turmoil and transcending national borders (e.g., poverty, autocracy, and climate change).

Of course, anyone with a lick of intelligence (including the conferees) will recognize that life never divides so neatly. Indeed, as I’ve written, the internationalist ideology that’s governed U.S. foreign policy-making since Pearl Harbor has always sought to eliminate the social and economic conditions considered key to the appeal of its communist adversaries. Similarly, Traub reports that many of the conferees arrived at answers essentially amounting to “all of the above.” That is to say, a revival of traditional power politics, epitomized by Russia’s muscle-flexing in its immediate neighborhood, was being accompanied by the rise of transnational threats that are best handled cooperatively. And all the while, nation-states as a whole “are much weaker than they were,” with the United States either unable or unwilling “to reassure allies or scare off adversaries as it once could.”

But what apparently went unrecognized is that national power will remain decisive whether cooperative or conflictive impulses and dynamics wind up on top. The importance of power in a completely rough-and-tumble world should be obvious. Its importance in a world where more positive-sum logic is more widespread is admittedly more difficult to identify, but no less paramount.

The reason is that even within communities that have developed commonly recognized authorities for organizing action, cooperation will always have a structure, and that structure will tend to have significantly different effects on different parts of that community. To the extent that these differences matter (which is often the case), various community members will usually have different preferences for moving ahead. The winners and losers are often determined by the amounts of resources (economic power) they can mobilize on behalf of their causes, by the the bounds of existing law and policy, and by their relative persuasive gifts. Often outcomes result from some combination of all of these.

When no commonly recognized authority exists, as with international politics today, persuasion can sometimes work also. Existing policies rarely count for much, law for even less, but relative power typically plays the biggest role. Consequently, as long as it matters to Americans that their priorities (or something close) prevail in international cooperative ventures or negotiations, their leaders will need to bring as much power as possible, in all of its forms, to bear on the relevant planning or bargaining sessions at the relevant international organizations or other venues  – whether to pressure, to induce, or to threaten credibly or exercise the option of walking away if their course isn’t satisfactory.

A final argument for focusing on cultivating power should be especially compelling for those Brookings invitees – and others – who have had actual policy-making experience. They should know better than anyone else how suddenly unpredictably international challenges and opportunities can arise. Power is no guarantee of coping successfully. But who can doubt that the strong and the wealthy will fare much better, mainly because they enjoy more relatively good options, than the weak and poor?

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: If Larry Summers Really Wanted to End Secular Stagnation….

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allies, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, Ben Bernanke, China, decoupling, emerging markets, Financial Crisis, Global Imbalances, globalization, Great Recession, International Monetary Fund, international organizations, Larry Summers, secular stagnation, World Trade Organization, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Former chief Obama economic advisor & Clinton Treasury Secretary Larry Summers has almost uniquely come quite a way in analyzing the major problems caused for the American economy by U.S. trade and other globalization policies. But the latest of his widely syndicated newspaper columns shows that in the most crucial respects, he has a long way to go, suggesting that the rest of the America’s economic policy establishment undoubtedly has even more rethinking to do.

Once a prominent champion of trade deals that have needlessly sent so much of the nation’s productive economy overseas, Summers has had at least two important second thoughts. Lately, he’s been pushing the idea that an American economy unquestionably shaped by Washington’s international economic policies is suffering from “secular stagnation.” This malady is defined as an inability to grow adequately without inflating dangerous financial bubbles. Although Summers doesn’t blame America’s recent approach to the international economy, it’s an especially striking indictment given how significant the globalization strategies he favored were supposed to be in shaping the country’s economic future – not to mention how much triumphalism they fostered.

In addition, as I’ve reported, Summers now agrees that unless it responds effectively to currency manipulation by foreign governments, proposed U.S. trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership could be more bane than boon for America.

His newest offering adds another useful insight: Too many participants on both sides of the debate on trade and globalization policies are neglecting the needs of the middle and working classes in the United States and other industrialized countries. As he writes:

“It sometimes seems that the prevailing global agenda combines elite concerns about matters such as intellectual property, investment protection and regulatory harmonisation with moral concerns about global poverty and posterity, while offering little to those in the middle.”

Summers strangely adds “rising urban populations” in developing countries to the list of overlooked constituencies, but I fully agree with his claim that approaches that remain so blinkered “are unlikely to work out well in the long run.”

But the larger point made by Summers here shows that he remains utterly clueless as to the real dangers created by U.S. trade failures. Indeed, his proposed solutions would make matters far worse. According to Summers – who’s now back teaching at Harvard – China’s successful creation of a new infrastructure financing bank over American objections shows that “This past month may be remembered as the moment the United States lost its role as the underwriter of the global economic system.” Consequently, “a comprehensive review of the US approach to global economics is urgently needed.”

As Summers sees it, the United States must reestablish its bona fides for global economic leadership by encouraging, not resisting, the creation of a “new global economic architecture” that reflects the rise of China and other emerging market countries; and by subordinating itself to the same international rules that it insists others obey.

I have my doubts as to whether an objective as gauzy as “global economic leadership” deserves any priority in Washington – if it’s defined, as Summers seems to, as the ability to steer the world economy toward goals that would benefit all countries. Not that I object in principal to win-win global outcomes.  But where’s the evidence that even America’s allies are interested in anything more than free-riding on U.S. economic largesse, and in continuing to grow mainly by wracking up trade surpluses with the United States? China and the rest of the so-called emerging world, more growth-starved than ever these days because their own economies are slowing dramatically, are even further off the reservation.  

Moreover, as dreary as its performance has been since the financial crisis struck, the U.S. economy has been the world’s pace-setter among industrialized countries and it’s outgrown even many developing countries. Combined with its still decent outlook amid a weakening international recovery, this development keeps strengthening the case that the United States is “decoupling” from the rest of the world – and by extension, that any form of leadership is less and less necessary.  

But if I did value leadership, I’d be mindful, unlike Summers, that the only dependable foundation for this role is the kind of unquestionably superior economic and financial strength that the United States has spent nearly a quarter century squandering – largely through offshoring-friendly trade policies. This kind of predominance is essential either to lead through historically traditional muscle-flexing, or to lead in line with Summers’ conception – which happens to have been Washington’s general approach for most of the post-World War II period – by providing “public goods,” like wide, asymmetrically open import markets and lots of liquidity. Without such a margin of superiority, Leadership Version Number One will be all too easy to resist, and Leadership Version Number Two will founder for the very reasons it’s failed since the early 1970s – its over-magnanimity will degrade its material basis.

Further, as I’ve argued here, giving developing countries – especially China – more authority in international institutions is bound to deepen the economic woes faced by not only America, but by the entire world. For it will strengthening the forces of the secular stagnation that so alarms Summers. After all, in their understandable but shortsighted determination to grow at all costs, these countries will surely use organizations like the International Monetary Fund like they’ve used the World Trade Organization.  They’ll enable ever more economic free-riding, mainly by curbing Washington’s ability to respond. The inevitable result will be ever more third world export-led growth at the expense of America’s manufacturing base, and a deepening need for U.S. leaders to sustain phony prosperity through easy money.

As a result, even more ominously, this Summers strategy will contribute to fueling the kinds of global imbalances that triggered the last financial crisis, ensuing Great Recession, and current feeble recovery.

The lessons couldn’t be more clear. Whether you favor a broader or narrower view of U.S. leadership, there’s no substitute for rebuilding American wealth and power. And if you’re interested in creating a global economy that’s more stable, less crisis-prone, and better positioned to foster the greatest prosperity for all countries over the longest run, an America capable of administering some tough love, and of course wise enough to do so, is your very best bet as well.  

By the way, Summers, former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, and many other leading economists have been engaged in a vigorous blogging debate over both the global and domestic implications of secular expansion, and the related issue of whether the notion is valid to begin with.  Although they and the commentary they’ve inspired has generally ignored this dimension, these new writings bear strongly on the trade deals Congress is evaluating, and I’ll put my two cents in as soon as I digest their analyses.

 

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Obama Ignores the Diplomacy Lesson Taught by China’s Aid Bank Gambit

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allies, Asian Development Bank, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, China, diplomacy, international organizations, international relations, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, power, TPP, Trade, trade agreements, Trans-Pacific Partnership, World Bank

You have to be a regular visitor to the furthest reaches of business news websites to be up to speed on the controversy over dealing with the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) China has organized. Which is a shame, because the issues involved bring up our most fundamental ideas about how international relations are actually carried out and how they should be carried out.  They show how violently many of them clash.  And they point to the dangers of learning the wrong lessons.

The bank is an institution that Beijing says will serve two main purposes. First, it will speed up lending to Asian countries for urgently needed infrastructure projects that has been slowed by concerns about adequate spending controls, environmental standards, merit-based contracting practices, and similar conditions typically attached by existing development organizations like the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. Second, it will give Asians more control over their own destinies, because those existing aid organizations are still dominated by Western countries – and by extension the supposedly Western values epitomized by their aforementioned policies.

The United States initially opposed the AIIB’s creation. But when China pushed ahead anyway, Washington began focusing on urging its regional allies and other Asian countries, as well as prospective non-Asian donor governments, to give it the cold shoulder. Unfortunately, many of these countries have ignored U.S. wishes, too – including Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and probably Australia.

The results add up to a major setback for American diplomacy – but also a self-inflicted one. U.S. leaders have viewed the Bank’s creation as part of a Chinese master plan to ensure that the rules of commerce in the economically dynamic Asia-Pacific region are written by free market countries and therefore reflect free market norms, rather than by Beijing and other champions of more secretive, more discriminatory, and more nationalistic practices. In addition to opposing the Bank’s creation, the Obama administration also has sought to respond by concluding the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal, whose provisions it believes will lock the region into a free market future, and create incentives for countries seeking to join (like China) to change their ways.

But China’s successes are just the latest reminder that Washington completely misunderstands the forces that separate the winners from the losers not only in Asian politics, but around the world. For as widely reported, even America’s closest partners are cooperating with China because the lure of Chinese economic power, and the promise of increasing access to China’s enormous actual and potential market, have proven irresistible. All maintain generally free market, and thus rule-based, economic systems at home.  But none of these governments seems concerned about entering arrangements with countries like China, which actively reject the primacy of rules and all of their corollaries, like openness, and accountability to consumers, voters, and the like.

In other words, President Obama’s focus on rule-writing is completely misplaced. Fortunately, the United States has ample power of its own. In fact, as the most important final market by far for all countries currently involved in the TPP negotiations, and for all countries hoping to join, as well as the military protector of many of these nations (and of the Europeans flocking to the AIIB), the United States should have no trouble keeping the lid on China’s influence. A simple declaration that “If you want the benefits of trade with and protection by the United States, you need to act like it,” should suffice – along of course with the determination to walk this walk.

But the most important ingredient for this strategy is a U.S. chief executive who recognizes that world affairs is still mostly jungle, not civics class. Troublingly, the record indicates that Americans won’t get one until January, 2017 at the earliest.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Delusions About the Nation-State

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21st century rules, citizenship, global norms, Immigration, International Monetary Fund, international organizations, International Trade Organization, internationalism, Kerry, League of Nations, nation-state, nationality, Obama, Open Borders, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, United Nations, Woodrow Wilson, World Bank, World Trade Organization

A New York Times essay earlier this week suggesting that the idea of the nation-state was growing ever more obsolete didn’t contain any explicit policy recommendations. And even though this omission raises the question of why the piece was published in the first place, that was actually all to the good.

Author Taiye Selasi, identified as a “writer, photographer and globetrotter,” as well as novelist with a highly cosmopolitan background, unquestionably falls into the “Open Borders” camp on immigration policy. But she seems to have (reluctantly?) realized (along with Times editors in this case?) the complete irrelevance to decision-makers of observations like “the discrimination experienced by dark-skinned [African] refugees migrating to the West and dark-skinned Italians migrating north [within Italy] is the same.” Why else would the author not explicitly have called for a country suffering its third recession since 2008 to indiscriminately admit everyone who crossed over the Mediterranean fleeing indisputably genuine poverty and hopeless in their own homelands?

To be sure, Selasi did condemn what she views as the (sometimes, in her view, unwittingly) hypocritical practice of people from countries whose national identities have continually changed due to cross-border migration flows using the idea of nationality to “justify barriers to citizenship.”

“Who better,” she asked indignantly, “than the Italian citizen, the all-American, the East Berliner, to understand that a country that has perpetually expanded to include new complexions, inflections and politics might (lo, must) expand once more?” Yet she never insisted that these countries tear down all of their physical and administrative barriers to entry, and keep them down in perpetuity.

There’s an even broader reason for Selasi’s failure to relate her other major observation to major questions before U.S. and other leaders. But unfortunately, at least when it comes to the American foreign policy establishment, it’s much less obvious. In addition to defining nationality and citizenship, the author also focused on the claim that “The idea of the modern nation-state — a sovereign state governing a cultural nation — [is] just that: an idea, 350 years old and showing its age. There [is] nothing eternal about nations, nothing biological about nationality.”

In fact, the view that nation-states are receding in importance is central to a long and deeply held beliefs among American internationalists on the right and left alike – that the political structure of the world is something that is unfinished and in a constant state of flux, and indeed moving, however unevenly and haltingly, towards ever greater degrees of integration. As a result, American internationalism holds, the nation’s diplomacy should try to nurture this process – even, at least in some instances, if it means sacrificing American interests.

As with other tenets of modern U.S. internationalist thinking, the belief in an unfinished global political structure first took meaningful form under President Woodrow Wilson in the immediate aftermath of World War I, when he sought to prevent another such conflagration by encouraging creation of a League of Nations. His own country, of course, rejected joining even the weakened version of the organization that eventually was formed, as Congress and the public feared being drawn into all manner of foreign conflicts that did not directly threaten American security. But this decision has since then been villified by internationalists as the height of disastrously narrow and shortsighted thinking, and turned into a pillar of the national conventional wisdom.

After World War II, Congress certainly learned this supposed lesson, as it strongly supported creation of the United Nations and other international organizations (nixing only U.S. membership in a proposed International Trade Organization, and thereby killing this predecessor of the World Trade Organization).

It’s easy to point out that during the subsequent Cold War decades, this unfinished world thinking was reduced to boilerplate. Washington did indeed dominate the new World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and ignored the United Nations and other principles of international law whenever convenient. But it’s just as important that, nearly as soon as the Cold War ended, integrationist talk was back with a vengeance. Not only was it epitomized by President George H.W. Bush’s references to a “New World Order.” It was made concrete by Washington’s agreement to create a World Trade Organization with strong enforcement authority that regularly ruled against the United States.  And it was fueled continually by the global ideological defeat of communism, the movement of so many national economies toward free market practices and principles, the surge in global trade and investment flows that bypassed borders with remarkable ease, and the emergence of digital technologies that positively seemed to mock them.

More recently, it’s become clear that strong beliefs about benign changes that are shaping the international system have powerfully influenced President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry – and in particular muddled their initial responses to Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons to suppress the revolt against his brutal rule in Syria, and to Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s moves against Ukraine. Stunned that these dictators didn’t care about global norms against certain weapons of mass destruction, and didn’t agree that new, “21^st century rules“ had rendered obsolete aggression and subversion against neighbors, the president and his top diplomat were caught flat-footed.

The reason, it’s clear to me, anyway, is that Kerry and Mr. Obama went further in their minds than Selasi did in her Times article, and did try to draw dramatic policy conclusions from their related beliefs in the nation-state’s decline and the strength of integrative forces around the world. More specifically, they wildly conflated the two, and in the process overlooked a far more important reality: Whether the nation-state is fading or not, for the foreseeable future, the world’s population will continue to be divided into numerous discreet units. And because consensus on acceptable behavior (norms) will remain elusive at best, these units – no matter their appearance or composition – will find themselves trapped in a struggle for both security and prosperity.

By no means does that mean that all forms of international cooperation will be impossible, whether ad hoc or even more systematic. But it does mean that Americans leaders’ supreme challenge will long remain ensuring the nation’s safety and well-being in the here and now, in the largely conflictual world they’ll be stuck with.  As for wracking their brains on the long-range-at-best objective of trying to turn that world into something significantly more pleasant — that’s likeliest to remain a dangerous distraction.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Obama’s UN Message was Squarely in America’s (Dubious) Diplomatic Tradition

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21st century rules, alliances, China, civil society, East Asia, Hillary Clinton, human rights, international organizations, NATO, NGOs, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, UN, WTO

Anyone could be forgiven for listening to President Obama’s just-completed speech to the UN General Assembly and wondering what on earth he thought he was doing. Even given the tendency for the most down-to-earth American presidents to turn into gasbags when addressing the world body, and his own quasi-messianic streak, Mr. Obama’s offering seemed noteworthy for ethereal boilerplate.

Especially at a time when aggressors are on the march in eastern Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia, just what did the president think he was doing in urging the assembled delegates to “reject fatalism or cynicism,” to throw away “a rule-book written for a different century,” to recognize “that we gain more from cooperation than conquest,” to “lift our eyes beyond our borders,”and to “meet our responsibility to observe and enforce international norms”?

After all, seated before him were representatives of the very governments responsible for so many of the woes and threats he bemoaned – whose leaders are, as per that famous 1960s saying, part of the problem, not part of the solution. Did the president really think that his inspiring words would convert regimes not only behind so much international violence, but that came to and maintain power through the barrel of a gun?

The best answer is “Of course not” – but not necessarily because Mr. Obama may be a closet cynic, or may be a mindless prisoner of American diplomatic convention, or may be trying to score some easy global propaganda points. All these characterizations may apply to the president. But he’s also remaining true to a longstanding principle of the internationalist ideology that has shaped American foreign policy since Pearl Harbor – and that also, worrisomely, is a major illusion. It’s the belief that the very structure of world politics, not just individual regimes, is not only in a state of flux, but moving steadily towards needed revolutionary change – and the corollary conviction that enlightened U.S. policies can hasten its arrival.

The change anticipated by President Obama, all of his predecessors, and the rest of America’s foreign policy establishment, is that the unit that has organized world politics for centuries – the nation-state – is not only fundamentally harmful, but transient. Therefore, Washington within reason should be actively undermining it and planning for its demise and replacement by global systems of cooperation.

At first, this sounds as naïve as Mr. Obama sounded in New York earlier today. After all, it’s common knowledge that the UN and other international organizations and international law itself are institutions and arrangements to which U.S. leaders pay lip service and ignore whenever convenient. And often this common knowledge is true. But often it’s not true, and in ways as important as they’re neglected.

The clearest example by far is the notion popularized by the president and Secretary of State Kerry, and mentioned again this morning, that the world is well on the way to adopting a set of new rules of statecraft that have made war obsolete and that center on peaceful dispute resolution. As is now painfully clear, China and especially Russia haven’t bought on – and the administration has clearly been surprised by their stubbornness.

International organizations themselves offer another important example. Not that the UN, in particular, hasn’t become almost completely marginal to American foreign policy. It has. Once the Cold War began, it was clear that the Security Council’s authority to prevent or end aggression could never be used in conflicts that really counted (the Korean war was a notable exception), and even after the Berlin Wall fell, it’s generally been too difficult to forge consensuses that include Russia and/or China (the first Persian Gulf war was a notable exception).

Nevertheless, in the early 1990s, the United States spearheaded the creation of another international organization – the World Trade Organization – that does have major enforcement authority. And even though success in the global economy has become ever more important to both American prosperity and security, the WTO has frequently ruled against the United States and Washington has adopted and observed a policy of abiding by these decisions.

Yes, the WTO has strongly served the interests of offshoring U.S. multinational corporations – by ensuring that the U.S. market will remain almost completely open to all the goods they produce in their foreign factories. But most trade policy critics in Congress also regularly vote to maintain America’s membership. And although their support reflects the power of inertia in politics and policy, it also stems from the view that, whatever short-term or individual losses may result, the entire U.S. economy’s long-term interests are best served by creating a durable system for legally resolving international trade disputes.

This belief in a better global future lies behind American policy towards another kind of arrangement – military alliances. America’s main alliances – with NATO’s European members and Canada, and with Japan – have been in place for some six decades. As frequently declared, their main purposes were coldly pragmatic – to keep these strategically and economically valuable regions in the free world, to ensure that the United States would not be fighting its enemies alone, and to maximize the odds that aggressors would be fought “over there” rather than “over here.”

But Washington had an agenda that was never fully voiced to the American public: Although U.S. leaders constantly sought greater allied defense contributions, they also wanted to make sure that America predominated, and in fact would obviate the need for Germany and Japan in particular to take major responsibility for their own security in the first place. If these wartime enemies could be freed to concentrate on their own peaceful development, the main sources of instability and conflict in these two major regions would be eliminated, and transnational economic integration and collective security regimes could emerge. (These U.S. hopes have proved far more realistic in Europe than in Asia.)

All the strategy required were military expenditures that badly strained U.S. and ultimately global finances, and trade policies that gave these regions unreciprocated access to U.S. markets and helped hollow out America’s productive economy.

And yet, transformational hopes also unmistakably explain why, after the end of the Cold War, America’s alliance strategy literally never skipped a beat. After the overriding security reasons for these arrangements’ very existence either disappeared or morphed dramatically (in the case of China), Washington worked overtime to concoct series of new rationales and missions, continuing to run outsized risks and pay outsized costs in order to turn the age-old political dynamics of Europe and the Far East into…something better.

President Obama’s UN speech today prominently displayed another dimension of this belief in the transience of nation-states – the conviction that the importance of their national governments is on the wane, and that non-governmental actors are on the rise in world politics. In this sense, for much of his speech, Obama didn’t view his principal audience as the delegates seated in Turtle Bay. Instead, he was addressing “the Lebanese factions rejecting those who try to provoke war;” “ young people across the Muslim world”; entrepreneurs in Malaysia; the young Iraqi man who “started a library for his peers”; civil society in Senegal; and the like.

He was addressing these inspirational individuals and groups to help spread their example. But he was also sending a message that Washington has continually transmitted to the developing world – often albeit inconsistently and uncertainly – that the United States will be just as happy to do official business with non-government actors as with their repressive leaders. And the reason has not only to do with a feeling of moral satisfaction, or a confidence that these individuals and groups represent the future, but because the institutions and networks they create are thought to matter greatly in the here and now.

Mr. Obama’s former chief diplomat, Hillary Clinton, recently provided a sense of how central to American foreign policy this cultivation of what’s called civil society has become.

As she wrote in her Washington Post review of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s new book on American foreign policy, she took the helm at Foggy Bottom recognizing that “new technologies” could “help citizens hold leaders accountable” as well as “help dictators keep tabs on dissidents.” She understood that “non-state actors,” including “courageous NGOs” were steadily growing in influence. She realized that “International problems and solutions are increasingly centered, in ways both good and bad, on nongovernmental organizations, businesses and individual citizens.”

And because “foreign policy is now as much about people as it is about states,” America’s “levers of leadership are not just about keeping our military strong and our diplomacy agile; they are about standing up for human rights, about advancing the rights and role of women and girls, about creating the space for a flourishing civil society and the conditions for broad-based development.”

The promise inherent in these insights should be self-evident, simply because the list of consequential international actors has expanded qualitatively. Unfortunately, the dangers are easily overlooked. They could blind U.S. leaders to difficult but inescapable tradeoffs, leading them to pursue the (supposed) perfect instead of the good. They could addict them to grandiose, unattainable, and unnecessary schemes and obscure the viability and often the necessity of mere muddling through. They could prevent them from promptly pulling the plug on loser projects. And they could turn reduce the nation’s approach to key individual and clusters of challenges into complete mush – not least of all in the eyes of leading adversaries.

A great example: Secretary Clinton’s description of the Asia strategy she and the president pursued – which she writes “centered on strengthening our traditional alliances; elevating and harmonizing the alphabet soup of regional organizations, such as ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) and APEC (the ¬Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation organization); and engaging China more broadly — both bilaterally, through new venues such as the Strategic and Economic Dialogue, and multilaterally, in settings where regional pressure would encourage more constructive behavior and shared decision-making on matters from freedom of navigation to climate change to trade to human rights. Our ‘pivot to Asia,’ as it came to be known, is all about establishing a rules-based order in the region that can manage the peaceful rise of new powers and promote universal norms and values.”

To which one can only reasonably respond “Huh?” and “No wonder the Chinese are on the move.”

American leaders are often admonished (especially by each other) to deal with the world as it is, not as they would wish it to be. But it’s increasingly clear that a big problem with U.S. foreign policy is a strong penchant for defining this distinction out of existence to begin with.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: India Shows US Folly of WTO

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consensus, India, international law, international organizations, Modi, Trade, WTO, {What's Left of) Our Economy

I have to admit – part of me admires new Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for singlehandedly blocking a new World Trade Organization agreement to streamline customs procedures throughout the global economy. The proposed deal falls considerably short of a global trade game-changer. In fact, its main value seems to be in showing that the WTO has not become completely moribund now that its members have deadlocked on a significant world trade liberalization deal, and many have ramped up efforts to reach regional agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership instead.

Nonetheless, Modi was under heavy international pressure to cave in, and resisted. His rationale? “Do we choose feeding our poor or getting good press world-wide?” I have no idea whether the food stockpiles other WTO countries found so objectionable actually do prevent hunger in India, or represent the best way to do so. But I was impressed to see a leader unabashedly prioritizing his own nation’s interests over those of some abstract “global community” or supposed set of “global norms” in language that would have made his Israeli counterpart Binyamin Netanyahu proud.

At the same time, India’s ability to veto an entire global trade agreement all by itself spotlights one of the WTO’s biggest structural flaws, and one so serious from Day One that it should have convinced Washington to stay out: the organization’s requirement, carried over from its predecessor global trade body, that decisions be made by a consensus of the entire membership if at all possible.

In this way, the WTO differs fundamentally from other international organizations, like the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund. In those bodies, an outsized share of the real power was given to the strongest, wealthiest countries, in the form of the Security Council and its veto provision at the UN, and in the form of weighted voting at the IMF. By contrast, the WTO in effect established equal power for all countries, regardless of their characteristics.

This egalitarianism was mainly codified because most of the world’s national economies viewed it as vital for achieving one of their highest priority goals – reining in America’s legal authority to act unilaterally to advance or defend its trade interests. For a world heavily dependent on exporting to the United States to achieve and maintain prosperity, few developments could be more dangerous. Fortunately for these U.S. competitors, American trade policy was (as today) tightly controlled by offshoring and importing interests, and Washington agreed to a system bound to leave the U.S. market open much wider than other national markets.

But as made clear by Modi’s gambit, consensus-based decision-making also gives grossly outsized influence to countries whose real-world attributes merit nothing of the kind. Of course, India has an enormous population, and has made impressive strides alleviating poverty and modernizing its economy. Relatively speaking, however, it remains a pygmy, representing only 3.03 percent of global output as of last year.

Because there’s nothing even close to a worldwide consensus on acceptable trade and related economic practices, no conceivable WTO reforms can solve the problem – at least on a basis acceptable to the United States. Instead, Washington should take full advantage of the opt-out provision of its WTO accession agreement and leave the organization at the next opportunity (which comes up in 2015). As American leaders never should have forgotten, the best guarantors of U.S. security, independence, and prosperity have always been its own power and wealth – not the useless-at-best and potentially dangerous illusions of international law and institutions.