Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Hollowing Out of Globalism

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balance of power, Fareed Zakaria, foreign policy establishment, globalism, interventionism, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Trump, Vietnam War, Washington Post, William Whitworth

Nearly fifty years ago, then-New Yorker columnist William Whitworth authored one of the strongest critiques of America’s disastrous war in Vietnam. In a book based on lengthy interviews with one of the war’s prime architects, Whitworth showed clearly that America’s Vietnam intervention had become its own justification – “a tiger eating its tail.” The “best and brightest” American leaders had decided, in the words of this review, that the United States needed a balance of power in Asia to protect its interests, and it needed to protect its interests to protect the balance.  

I couldn’t help but think of Whitworth’s book when I read the latest Washington Post column by Fareed Zakaria. For this supposed strategic guru has (unwittingly, of course) indicated that he and the the rest of America’s bipartisan foreign policy establishment no longer support far-reaching U.S. global engagement and assertive leadership against perceived Trump-ian assault because they’re considered essential to achieve vital national goals. Instead, Zakaria made clear that in his own mind, this engagement and leadership has become nothing more than a good in and of itself, devoid of a concrete rationale. And because he has his finger on the establishment’s pulse, it’s likely that his colleagues’ justifications for America’s basic post-World War II diplomatic blueprint are dissolving into this form of strategic incoherence as well.

According to Zakaria, there’s strong evidence that, due to Mr. Trump’s “bizarre candidacy” and “chaotic presidency,” the world is undergoing a “bout of anti-Americanism” that “feels very different” from previous versions. Based on a recent poll, he writes that “people around the world increasingly believe that they can make do without America. Trump’s presidency is making the United States something worse than just feared or derided. It is becoming irrelevant.”

What’s most fascinating and revealing about this judgment is that Zakaria is not making the standard case that any Trump-ian or other form of retreat from the American globalism of the past 75 years or so will damage the United States directly. (It’s true that foreigners either “fearing” or especially “deriding” America could have damaging results, but the fact that Zakaria seems to regard both – strikingly different – possibilities as equally likely reveals that even he doesn’t take them especially seriously.)

Nor does Zakaria make the equally important globalist contention that such a U.S. retreat will be disastrous for the many countries that have benefited from this worldwide American engagement and leadership – and that their misfortunes will eventually harm the United States.

In fact, he’s making exactly the opposite argument – that these beneficiaries are now confident that they can stand on their own two feet.

Now there are any number of reasons to view this development with alarm – but Zakaria doesn’t make these either. And it can’t be entirely coincidental that none of them jibe well with the “enlightened” part of the “enlightened self-interest” globalists constantly insist their approach exemplifies.

For example, Zakaria and his establishment colleagues could be worried that the rest of the world is profoundly and dangerously wrong, and that globalism’s foreign beneficiaries cannot in fact “make do without America.” And the globalists could be right. But does anyone really expect Zakaria et al to start arguing that the United States and especially its globalist leaders know better what’s in those countries’ interests than foreign leaders themselves?

The Zakarias of the world could also argue that, without American leadership and engagement, the rest of the world will miss few opportunities to oppose or threaten U.S. interests. But would those countries that have been depicted for so long by the globalists as such staunch allies, which so thoroughly share American values, really change their stripes so suddenly? Could six months of a Trump presidency possibly spur such a dramatic turnabout? And why would it loom so much larger in foreign minds than the three quarters of a century of such enlightened American globalism?

Indeed, as just suggested, why isn’t Zakaria drawing from the foreign sentiments he describes a much more encouraging conclusion? That his brand of globalism has (finally!) achieved its intended goal by fostering at least in crucial centers of wealth and power like Europe and Japan both the capabilities to defend themselves when needed and the cooperative beliefs required to sustain a rules-based global political and economic order.

As I see it, the real message of Zakaria’s column is that America’s globalists have turned engagement and leadership into ends in and of themselves, like their Vietnam-era forerunners came to value the act of intervening itself higher than their eventually empty definition of victory.

But I wouldn’t exclude another possibility – which isn’t inconsistent at all with the above: That the globalists want America to keep playing international leader (or value this leadership whether it’s still real or not) simply because they find this role emotionally and psychologically gratifying, and because shilling for this position has created so many careers that have been so lavishly rewarded in so many ways.

And in this respect, the rest of us could be lucky that the Mainstream Media gives the globalists such free reign to express their unvarnished, unedited views. Because as their complaints about Trump-ian foreign policies get louder and more forceful, their fundamental irrationality could become more apparent as well.

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Im-Politic: How I Scooped The Times on Trump and Nationalism 25 Years Ago

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America First, Democrats, elites, environmentalists, foreign policy, globalism, globalization, Im-Politic, Immigration, internationalism, interventionism, middle class, minoriites, nationalism, politics, Populism, Republicans, sovereignty, The National Interest, The New York Times, Thomas Edsall, Trade, Trump, working class

However conceited it sounds, it really is time – again – 🙂 to pat myself on the back. This morning’s New York Times featured a long analysis by contributor Thomas Edsall titled “The End of Left and Right as We Knew Them.” The main thesis (as per a quote from the director of the “International Institutions and Global Governance Program” at the Council on Foreign Relations):

“The most salient political division today is not between conservatives and liberals in the United States or social democrats in the United Kingdom and France, but between nationalists and globalists.”

Edsall himself elaborates:

“By now it has become quite clear that conservative parties in Europe and the United States have been gaining strength from white voters who have been mobilized around issues related to nationalism — resistance to open borders and to third-world immigration. … On the liberal side, the Democratic Party and the center-left European parties have been allied in favor of globalization, if we define globalization as receptivity to open borders, the expansion of local and nationalistic perspectives and support for a less rigid social order and for liberal cultural, immigration and trade policies.”

Moreover, at the heart of these new divisions are class distinctions: The nationalists on both sides of the Atlantic are likeliest to be relatively poor and relatively uneducated – although Edsall does present research findings showing – unconvincingly in my view – that classic “racial resentment, more than economic anxiety, influenced the [U.S.} presidential election.”

Yet the author also unmistakably believes that the left “In recent decades…both in Europe and in the United States [has] begun to include and reflect the views of large numbers of well-educated elites — relatively affluent knowledge or creative class workers….” Indeed, he coins a nice phrase: “The rise of the affluent left.”

So what does this have to do with yours truly? Plenty. Because nearly 25 years ago, I predicted the development of exactly the same trend. My forecast came in an article for the journal The National Interest that was called (wait for it) “Beyond Left and Right” – and it got a fair amount of media attention from both liberals and conservatives. (The National Interest itself is on the right end of the spectrum.) 

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find versions on-line that aren’t behind pay walls, but here are a few excerpts from a dog-eared xerox:

“…a new underlying fault line [replacing the old left-right divisions] is already emerging in American foreign policy, dividing what might best be called nationalists and internationalists. In terms of American diplomacy, this new alignment will pit a generic model of foreign policy-making that long predates the Cold War – one based at bottom…on the belief that international activism itself is the key to American security and prosperity – against a rival approach…whose supreme goal is consolidating American military and economic strength, and enhancing America’s freedom of action. In the realm of economic policy, those who argue that the nation-state, as an economic player, is obsolete or dangerous will vie with those convinced of its continuing relevance and legitimacy. In electoral politics, sharp differences in economic interests and cultural outlooks will produce a widening rift between business, professional,and government elites on the one hand, and wage-earners on the other. The issue of class, in other words, is re-emerging in American politics.”

I added that these divisions were arising from “the different impact of world economic trends on different classes” and were producing “a foreign policy debate [that] increasingly pits social and economic classes against each other, focusing on the questions of who pays the costs and who incurs most of the risks involved in competing economic and security policies.

“Polls repeatedly show that the best educated and wealthiest Americans are the staunchest internationalists on both security and economic issues. The surveys also show strong support for internationalist policies to be lacking nearly everywhere else on the social spectrum. “

And there’s more. I wrote that “At the mass public level,” the nationalist faction would be comprised of “blue collar union members, white collar middle managers and small businessmen from the Perotista ranks; family- and community-oriented immigrants; and grassroots environmental activists.”

As for their rivals, “The social base of internationalism would include many big multinational businesses and their upper level managers, financiers, professionals, and retailers. Journalists and the rest of the mass media, as well as academics, also tend to support an idealistic globalism. Other members of a new internationalist coalition might include minorities whose fear of cultural conservative nationalists outweighs their qualms about job-destroying internationalist free-trade economics, and affluent, mainstream environmentalists.”

And there was more on the role of the media: “Much of what they lack in numbers, the internationalists would make up for in money, influence, and the aura of respectability that their media allies will continue to provide.”

What would happen to liberal and conservative internationalists in the process? The former

“may wind up permanently alienating labor, minorities, and the white-collar middle class whether they intend to or not – and lose their identity as champions of the underdog and as agents of progressive change in the process. Internationalists of the Right will face similar problems. Without offering their voters something more than NAFTA, the continuing “creative destruction” of their jobs, endless foreign interventions, and Marilyn Quayle’s definition of family values, it is difficult to see them avoiding George [H.W.] Bush’s political fate.”

For good measure, I added that if they do crystallize, the resulting new coalitions are likely to be “less inclined to compromise than their predecessors….”

Clearly, I didn’t get everything right. But I’m kind of amazed at how many developments I absolutely nailed. Further, we’re only a few months into the Trump era. In other words, the American political realignment I anticipated still probably has a long ways to go.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Who are the Real “Hot Heads”?

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alliances, allies, America First, Asia, China, Cold War, establishment, Europe, foreign policy, foreign policy establishment, globalism, H.R. McMaster, internationalism, interventionism, Jim Mattis, Jonathan Stevenson, national security adviser, NATO, NATO expansion, North Korea, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Populism, Russia, Stephen K. Bannon, The New York Times, Trump, U.S. military, Vietnam

The Mainstream Media remain useful as a mouthpiece for an American political establishment that retains all too much power to frustrate Trump-ian – and other populist – impulses. So it’s vitally important to identify and evaluate emerging narratives they’re trying to propagate. And one that’s been especially prominent – and pernicious – is the habit of dividing the president’s top aides into the voices of reason (my term) and the “hot-heads.” A great example of this habit and the dangers it can foster, is Jonathan Stevenson’s February 21 New York Times column on President Trump’s appointment of Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster as his new White House national security adviser.

According to Stevenson – a national security veteran of the Obama administration – McMaster is a welcome addition to the voices of reason. In particular, his selection is portrayed as combining with that of former general Jim Mattis as Defense Secretary to strengthen a firewall against the “hot heads” (Stevenson’s term) that also have Mr. Trump’s ear.

Part of the reason Stevenson likes McMaster and Mattis et al is that he believes they will oppose “pointlessly disrupting” strategies and positions that he and many other establishment-arians (on both sides of the aisle) view as successes, or the best possible approaches – like the “One China” policy, the Iran nuclear deal, and immigration initiatives that seek to admit more refugees and other newcomers from the Middle East in hopes of winning hearts and minds in the Islamic world. I personally don’t agree with the Stevensonian/establishment view, but reasonable people can legitimately differ on these matters.

What’s much less reasonable, and genuinely dangerous, is Stevenson’s other reason for liking the world’s McMasters and Mattis’, and disliking its Stephen K. Bannon – the Trump aide who he and so many others view as a quintessential extremist and populist hot head. As the author sees it, McMaster is one of the national security professionals who will help make sure that American diplomacy won’t be unduly influenced by Trump-ists like Bannon. These ostensibly shallow, narrow-minded politicos supposedly see foreign policymaking not as an exercise in advancing and safeguarding the country’s most critical interests, but simply as a means of boosting or protecting a president’s popularity.

Although foreign policy can never be entirely separated from domestic politics – and in a democracy, shouldn’t be so separated – over-politicization can of course produce disaster. But Stevenson’s main historical example (the gradual escalation of the Vietnam War), and his analysis of the Trump administration, get literally everything important wrong. For example, two of his leading Vietnam villains (and those of Gen. McMaster) are then Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara and then national security adviser McGeorge Bundy. But far from being politicians who had any experience with the electoral process, or any apparent interest, they were quintessential establishment mandarins. In fact, it was their catastrophic advice that (rightly) turned “the best and the brightest” into a term of contempt.

The substance of their advice – chiefly, the championing of gradual escalation – can be faulted, too. But as Stevenson glosses over, this strategy enjoyed wide backing in the military, and not only among a group of military chiefs who McMaster and Stevenson dismiss as “inordinately politicized.”

Much more important, however, the fundamental mistake behind the Vietnam disaster was not the specific set of military tactics chosen, but the strategic decision to intervene militarily in the first place. And this choice reflected the strong internationalist consensus across the foreign policy establishment that, in the face of the Cold War community threat, every square inch of the globe had to be treated as a vital American interest, whether it held any specific geopolitical or economic significance to the United States or not.

Now fast forward to the present. Who’s more likely to embroil the United States into a needless military conflict that could spiral into a complete debacle? Mere “politicos” like Bannon – and his boss – who have complained (most recently in the Inaugural Address) that America has too often “defended other nations’ borders while refusing to defend our own”? Has “spent trillions of dollars overseas while America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay”?

Is a new Vietnam really what can be expected from a president who has declared, “We will seek friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world – but we do so with the understanding that it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first.

“We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it shine as an example for everyone to follow”?

For my money, I’d bet on the genuinely reckless foreign policy moves being advocated by figures from an establishment that, in the wake of Mr. Trump’s election, is doubling down on its support for internationalism – and therefore for the indiscriminate interventionism that logically follows from it. Indeed, lately this allegiance to internationalism has even blinded the establishment to rapidly mounting dangers from the pillars of post-World War II foreign policy – America’s security relationships with Europe and Asia.

In the former region, a completely unnecessary expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to include former Soviet republics and other nearby countries has committed the United States to protect lands that can be defended only by he threat of using nuclear weapons even though they have never been viewed as vital interests. In the process, of course, this NATO expansion has triggered a military and paramilitary reaction by Russia that has all of Europe on edge.

In Asia, America’s two likeliest adversaries – China and North Korea – are rapidly becoming capable of offsetting the nuclear weapons edge that has enabled Washington to protect countries like Japan and South Korea with little risk to the U.S. homeland. Ever more powerful nuclear forces now mean that Beijing and Pyongyang can use the credible threat of destroying American cities to deter U.S. military responses to any aggression they undertake.  (See this post for more detail – and for powerful evidence that Mr. Trump recognizes both problems.)

Indeed, in this respect, erring on the side of caution would involve President Trump siding with the America Firsters like Bannon – whatever short-term disruption their recommendations would bring – against the McMaster portrayed by Stevenson, and other establishmentarians he comfortingly but misleadingly labels as guardians of policy “stability.” That’s the last result that Washington will get from defining or simply wishing away lessons that have stared the nation and its leaders in the face for decades.

Im-Politic: Cruz on Foreign Policy Could be Both a Lot Worse & Lot Better

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China, Cold War, conservatives, Cuba, democracy, Donald Trump, foreign direct investment, Im-Politic, interventionism, isolationism, John Quincy Adams, morality and foreign policy, nation-building, neoconservatives, Republicans, Ronald Reagan, Soviet Union, Ted Cruz

Difficult as it is to remember sometimes, there are still candidates vying for the Republican presidential nomination other than Donald Trump. For example, there’s Senator Ted Cruz, who in fact has established himself as the runner up in most national polls so far and the leader in Iowa, whose caucuses kick off Campaign 2016’s actual voting.

I’m no Cruz-an, but I’m grateful to economic and security commentator Nevin Gussack for calling my attention to an April interview given to The Daily Caller by the freshman legislator. It shows that Cruz has some sensible instincts when it comes to an overall American approach to world affairs, but that he has a lot to learn about China.

In other contexts, Cruz’ claim that he’s neither a  “full neocon” nor a “libertarian isolationist.” in his strategic leanings could legitimately be dismissed as cynical, Clintonian triangulation. Unfortunately, both American foreign policy and the commentary it’s generated have so typically tended to view the nation’s world role in terms of starkly and foolishly dichotomous choices (like “interventionism” versus “isolationism”) that Cruz’ apparent attempt to stake out a middle ground decidedly encouraging.

In fact, though he cited former President Ronald Reagan as a role model, Cruz actually sounded more like John Quincy Adams, who served not only as president himself but as Secretary of State. In 1821, he famously articulated this definition of the U.S. purpose in world affairs:

“Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will [America’s] heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication….” [The rest is very much worth reading, too, but this section suffices for this post’s theme.]

It sounds an awful lot like the Caller‘s account of a “Cruz Doctrine”:

“‘I believe America should be a clarion voice for freedom. The bully pulpit of the American president has enormous potency,’ he [said], before praising former President Ronald Reagan for changing the ‘arc of history’ by demanding Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev tear down the Berlin Wall and lambasting President Barack Obama for not sufficiently standing on the side of freedom during Iran’s 2009 Green Revolution.

“But, Cruz noted, speaking out for freedom ‘is qualitatively different from saying U.S. military forces should intervene to force democracy on foreign lands.’”

I’m not sure I’m with Cruz on Reagan rhetoric bringing down that “Evil Empire.” But for all my hesitancy about the place of moral considerations in American diplomacy, I have no problem with a president speaking out on such questions, provided he or she doesn’t create unjustified foreign expectations about American actions, or provoke dangerous responses. It’s also, after all, entirely conceivable that such statements can do some good.

Even better, like Adams, Cruz is skeptical about involving the United States in protracted democracy-promotion campaigns: “It is not the job of the U.S. military to engage in nation building to turn foreign countries into democratic utopias.”

So far so good. But Cruz betrays some deep ignorance on the subject of China, and on the magnitude of the security threat it poses to America versus that of, say, Cuba. Asked why he favors normal relations with human rights abusers like China and Saudi Arabia, but not with Cuba, Cruz (whose father was born on and fled the island) replied:

“The situation with Cuba and China are qualitatively different. For one thing, in China, direct investment is allowed, where American investment can go into the country invest directly and work with the Chinese people, which is bringing economic development and is transforming China in significant ways. In Cuba, all outside investment has to go through the government. Lifting sanctions will inevitably result in billions of dollars flowing into the Castro government into its repressive machinery.

“Secondly, China or Qatar or the different countries you mentioned, none of them are 90 miles from our border.” Cuba is uniquely situated 90 miles away from the state of Florida. Cuba is a leading exporter of terrorism throughout Latin America. Cuba was recently caught smuggling arms to North Korea in the Panama Canal.”

If he wasn’t running for president, or serving as a U.S. Senator, Cruz might deserve some slack for his clearly emotional feelings about Cuba and his family. But whatever his family background, these views are ridiculous. The economic picture painted of China is flat wrong. First, the Chinese government still sets very strict conditions on incoming investment, and second, although China’s economic growth and modernization unquestionably have benefited, so has China’s military strength and technological sophistication. Even many of the world’s most historically craven panda-huggers have decided that reform in the PRC has now shifted into reverse despite all the economic and even political liberalization that they once predicted inevitably would be produced by engagement with democratic, capitalist world.

Moreover, China’s burgeoning military power wouldn’t be such a concern if its leaders had decided to keep conducting a relatively quiet, passive foreign policy. But those days clearly are long gone, as Beijing has demonstrated a strong determination to expand its territory and influence in the East Asia/Pacific region at America’s expense. Moreover, the Chinese government’s burgeoning cyber-hacking activities are only the latest signs of the dangers of allowing current economically “normal” relations – including massive technology transfer – to proceed apace. And we haven’t even gotten to the damage to the U.S. economy and therefore to its defense industrial base and potential done by China’s predatory trade policies.

No matter how close to American shores lilliputian Cuba might be, it would need to turn into a something like a huge ISIS base even to start threatening major U.S. security interests to this extent – and of course such hostile assets would be easy for American forces to flatten, or simply to embargo into helplessness.

A final worrisome note on the (obviously still embryonic) formulation of Cruz’s foreign policy ideas: Although he claims to reject “full neocon-ism,” the advisers he told The Caller he consults with are all firmly in that camp. Since the end of the Cold War, American conservatism has bred an impressive variety of schools of foreign policy thinking (unlike American liberalism). The more such resources he taps, the likelier Cruz will be to develop an international strategy that both wins votes and furthers American interests.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Wisdom and Blind Spots of Henry Kissinger

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China, economics, Henry Kissinger, idealism, international order, interventionism, Iran deal, Jacob Heilbrunn, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, power, Putin, realism, Russia, strategy, The National Interest, Ukraine, World War II

When I was helping to edit FOREIGN POLICY magazine, I used to say that the only authors whose articles I would ever accept sight unseen were those by U.S. and other present and former heads of major national governments, and Henry Kissinger. I never had the pleasure and honor of working with this former Secretary of State and presidential national security advisor, and disagreed with him strongly on major issues then and now. But I still haven’t seen any reason to doubt that Kissinger boasts a combination of hands-on policy experience (in what a well known Chinese curse understatedly calls “interesting times”) and deep historical knowledge that’s been unique.

So I would strongly urge everyone interested in U.S. foreign policy or world affairs to read the interview with Kissinger just published in The National Interest. I was, to be sure, disappointed that Editor Jacob Heilbrunn didn’t ask his subject about the Iran deal – especially since Kissinger and one of his successors, George Shultz, wrote an op-ed in April highly critical of President Obama’s efforts to deny Tehran nuclear weapons, but not flatly dismissing the possibility that the president could conclude an acceptable agreement. Now we have a final deal. What does Kissinger think? Maybe he’s still holding his cards close to his vest, and ruled the topic out of bounds in advance?

In fact, the only headline issue on which Kissinger comments is Russia’s grab for more power in Ukraine and elsewhere along its European borders. If you think Vladimir Putin is the devil incarnate, or the second coming of Stalin, you need to learn about Kissinger’s notably evenhanded interpretation of how this crisis emerged – with which I broadly agree. His ideas for easing East-West tensions deserve much more attention, too.

Ultimately, however, what I found most interesting about the interview has to do with what I have always found most disappointing about Kissinger – his failure to help develop a distinctly American version of “realist” diplomatic thinking.

At the start of the interview, Kissinger does a good job of defining the debate between realists (supposedly like himself) and “idealists” that has shaped much of American foreign policy since the end of World War II: “The way the debate is conventionally presented pits a group that believes in power as the determining element of international politics against idealists who believe that the values of society are decisive.” As this statement suggests, he (correctly) views the dichotomy as “simplistic” and “artificial,” but does (also correctly) acknowledge that these terms can influence how leaders order their priorities and strike balances among competing objectives.

Yet however important these concepts to American strategists, as I’ve pointed out, even avowed realists like Kissinger have consistently overlooked the single most important ingredient for successfully pursuing this approach – understanding geography and its implications. In fact, wherever they’ve stood on the realist-idealist spectrum, U.S. leaders have for decades followed a strategy that’s almost willfully defined geography out of existence. Both Democrats and Republicans alike, during and after the Cold War, have carried out policies of military intervention, alliance building, and economic integration, that are much more appropriate for a small, highly vulnerable country than for a continent-spanning power protected by two wide oceans.

From a geopolitical perspective, even Kissinger’s well known preoccupation with creating and preserving “international order” is a sign of diplomatic hubris rather than a hallmark of prudence and pragmatism. Why, after all, would such a serious and knowledgeable student of the past believe that disorder, including widespread chaos, is a natural – much less achievable – goal for a world lacking consensus on fundamental values and norms of behavior? And as a result, why has Kissinger been so thoroughly convinced – along with so many other political friends and foes – that for a country with the advantages enjoyed by the United States, surviving and prospering amid this tumult is a much more feasible aim than bringing it to an end, or even significantly moderating it?

Finally, the National Interest interview also confirms another big weakness of both Kissinger’s version of realism and post-World War II foreign policy – a refusal to think seriously about economics. The word isn’t even mentioned. In principle, anyway, neglecting wealth and its creation was understandable for America for most of the Cold War. The United States was predominant, it had no challengers on this front, and the chief threats Americans faced seemed overwhelmingly military. Since the early 1970s, however – not so so coincidentally, when Kissinger was most prominent – keeping this spot blind has been inexcusable. For in this material world, from where does Kissinger think power in all of its tangible forms ultimately springs?

Still, with the exception of China policy (where his consulting business has compromised his analysis, in my view), I’m glad Kissinger remains active on policy issues and continues advising politicians. He may be 92, but he’s orders of magnitude wiser, deeper, and sharper than virtually anyone else in America’s foreign policy establishment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: When Things Went Wrong

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Hawkish and Dovish Middle East Quackery on Display

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border security, doves, energy policy, hawks, interventionism, Iraq, ISIS, Marco Rubio, Middle East, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Syria, terrorism

If you’re still not convinced that America’s embryonic campaign against ISIS terrorism in the Middle East is heading toward an epic crackup, check out today’s Washington Post. Its Outlook section features two articles on the subject that are diametrically opposed to each other, fully representative of two major factions in the policy debate, and equally moronic. Especially depressing – each author serves up an explanation for the Middle East’s woes noteworthy only for its looniness.

According to Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, the region is a mess today because America has “walked away from its traditional role as the guarantor of global security.” The mistake most directly responsible for creating the current ISIS threat – and allegedly made by both President Obama and some supposedly isolationist Republicans? Failing to realize that “when the Syrian people rose up in 2011 in protest of Bashir Al-Assad’s brutal rule, our vital national interest was to prevent a protracted civil war in which radical jihadists from all over the world could rush into a vacuum. If they could seize operational spaces, they could use them to plan and carry out attacks against our allies and ultimately America.”

Rubio instead would have taken steps reportedly supported by many of Mr. Obama’s own senior advisors: promptly identifying and arming a “moderate Syrian opposition.” Interestingly, in this article, Rubio did not repeat the charge that the Obama administration needlessly and hastily pulled the last U.S. combat forces out of Iraq in 2011 and thereby helped ensure that the country we tumble back into chaos. But he did express these concerns once the President made his announcement in October, 2011.

There are certainly legitimate grounds for challenging both the President’s Syria and Iraq decisions. But there are no legitimate grounds for confidence that dramatically different policies on either front would have produced lasting solutions to the ISIS problem. On this score, the president is right. Iraqi leaders’ immediate return to score-settling once American troops left proves how artificial that country has been all along, and how far it remains from embracing anything like the pluralism needed for stability and cohesion.

The world’s Rubios apparently believe that decades-long U.S. military presences in places like South Korea demonstrate the need for and viability of patience. But Korea has always had a strong sense of “Korean-ness.” The idea of Iraqi national identity has always been a fantasy – even under so ruthless a dictator as Saddam Hussein. Just as important, the American public nowadays rightly has no interest in open-ended deployments of U.S. troops continually struggling to keep Sunnis and Shiites from each other’s throats.

And if Iraq has always been a disaster waiting to happen, the claim that aiding moderate Syrian rebels sooner would have fatally weakened ISIS becomes fatally weaker. For even if Assad’s most sympathetic enemies could have seized the upper hand militarily in that civil conflict, ISIS would still eventually have faced an open field in Iraq’s vast Sunni lands.

Moreover, more decisive U.S. policies against Assad would have done nothing to deal with the emergence of ISIS-like groups in dozens of other failed and failing states in places like the northern half of Africa. Rubio’s ringing call for “American leadership” to “shape” history and ensure “global stability” is nothing more than an historically ignorant formula for ensnaring the nation in an endless series of costly, bloody, and futile foreign interventions.

The Atlantic Council’s Ramzy Mardini convinced Outlook editors to run an article presenting what might be called the dovish equivalent of Rubio’s hawkishness. Actually, the word “half-hearted” needs be added to both descriptions – for just as Rubio stays conspicuously silent about the possibility of reintroducing sizable American combat forces into the Middle East to fight ISIS, Mardini writes that ISIS poses a problem that the United States should not “ignore.”

But Mardini insists that “while some military action is necessary to defeat the Islamic State,” he argues that this “effort should be driven by regional actors, not a Western power.” Because Outlook editors evidently never got around to asking “Like who?” I will. After all, look what’s happened in the mere days since President Obama’s primetime speech announcing the (current) anti-ISIS campaign. The Sunni countries have devoted most of their energies to proving my argument that none of them is internally stable or cohesive enough themselves to act militarily against an organization that, however abhorrent morally and threatening to their own regimes, uses the word “Islam” in its name. Indeed, just this morning came a report that the best the State Department can do so far along these lines is to claim (anonynmously) that an unspecified number of Arab Moslem states will be joining the air campaign at some unspecified point in equally unspecified ways.

Yet more incompetent than Mardini’s analysis of Arab security policies is his treatment of the roots of Middle East extremism dangerous enough and determined to threaten the United States. According to the author, “to the extent that the group poses any threat to the United States, that threat is magnified by a visible U.S. military role. Obama’s restraint in the use of military power in recent years has helped keep the Islamic State’s focus regional — on its efforts to establish an Islamic caliphate in the Middle East rather than on launching attacks against the United States. It’s only with the U.S. military’s return to Iraq and the prospect of U.S. intervention in Syria that the group’s focus has begun to shift.“

Maybe Mardini is talking about some other ISIS? The ISIS that’s on everyone’s mind now is the one led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Yes, he (reportedly) was radicalized by George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. But if true, what does this say al-Baghdadi? That by the time he reached adulthood, he either was firmly convinced that maintaining the brutal nation-wide prison that Sunni Saddam Hussein created in Iraq was better than any conceivable successor, or that he was so convinced that repressed non-Sunni groups would retaliate violently against the Sunni community that he saw no alternative but extremism himself. Either way, it’s clear that he comes from a culture and society that was thoroughly debased and a breeding ground for savagery – along with the scapegoating of outsiders – long before America’s interventions.

It’s also increasingly clear that both the Rubios and Mardinis and their respective camps have no clue about the most promising long-term U.S. anti-ISIS strategy by far: Concerted efforts on the border security and energy policy fronts by Washington to marginalize the Middle East for America – to ensure that its extremists can no longer reach the U.S. homeland and that the nation and world greatly reduce dependence on the region’s oil. The nation’s opinion editors don’t seem to have a clue, either. Why else would they keep ensuring that their commentary pages – and the national debate – remain monopolized by hawkish and dovish versions of Middle East quackery?

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Where the Experts are Blowing it Again

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foreign policy, grand strategy, interventionism, national interests, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, polling, public opinion, responsibilities

It’s long been clear to me that Main Street Americans have much better instincts than their country’s bipartisan foreign policy elites about what goals U.S. foreign policy should be seeking. The main reason seems to be that, even though few of the hoi polloi can name the leaders of many countries or even find these lands on maps, unlike the specialists they recognize intuitively that the United States is an fundamentally, even existentially, secure country.

In other words, the mass public isn’t big on the details, but understands the big strategic picture – that their country is separated from the greatest actual or potential military threats by thousands of miles of ocean, is richly endowed with all manner of economic resources, and that these priceless advantages should be fully exploited and maximized, not ignored or squandered.

The elites have the big picture completely wrong. They’ve mastered many details, but mistakenly believe that the United States is a fundamentally weak, insecure country, acutely sensitive to all manner of overseas troubles, and heavily and inevitably dependent on global prosperity for its own well-being.

The gap between the public’s bedrock foreign policy confidence and the elite’s state of constant alarmism was just illustrated once again by a new POLITICO poll of voters in so-called election battleground states. Consistent with a pretty longstanding pattern, solid majorities oppose more U.S. ”involvement” (the form wasn’t specified) in today’s hot spots, and in several cases, pluralities oppose even the current, modest level of involvement. (One key qualification – the poll predated the downing of the Malaysian airliner over eastern Ukraine.)

More surprising, and much more heartening, was respondents’ emphatic rejection of the claim that “As the world’s moral leader, the U.S. has a responsibility to use its military to protect democracy around the globe.” Only 22 percent agreed, versus 67 percent endorsing the view that “U.S. military actions should be limited to direct threats to our national security.”

These results are heartening because they signal strong public opposition to a basis for foreign policymaking strongly endorsed by liberal and conservative elites alike, but with almost no potential to produce either a sensible list of national foreign policy objectives and even less potential to foster the national consensus needed to pursue such goals successfully.

Here’s why: In my post of June 5 I argued (pretty cogently, I think!) that basing foreign policy on a concept of national interest (i.e., “selfish” considerations) was vastly superior to basing it on moral considerations. One of my main reasons: However difficult it always is to generate widespread agreement on policies that will make America safer, freer, or wealthier, it’s bound to be easier than generating agreement on policies that reflect the better angels of nature. Concrete policy benefits, costs, and risks, after all, are possible to measure with reasonably objective indicators. Granted, Americans broadly agree on many fundamental moral precepts. (It’s hard to imagine our society cohering at all if we didn’t.) But inherently subjective definitions of morality become even more subjective when applied to policy issues – and, I’d venture, international policy issues.

Basing U.S. foreign policy on a definition of America’s international responsibilities will undoubtedly be even more difficult. To start, such responsibilities can’t logically be identical with a definition of U.S. interests, since responsibilities are obligations individuals or collectives are supposed to assume apart from their interests. If the two were substantially identical, why would anyone bother spelling out responsibilities? So we’ve just reentered the realm of the highly, and maybe impossibly, subjective.

A further complication: Individuals and collectives can surely take responsibilities on themselves, and often do. But definitions of responsibilities can often include the expectations of others. That would seem to add yet another layer of fiendish complexity. Even more vexing, the expectations of other countries, in particular, can be self-serving at best and at worst contrary to U.S. interests.

None of this is to say that ideas regarding America’s international responsibilities – whether originating domestically, abroad, or some combination of the two – should never influence U.S. foreign policy, just as I would never insist that moral considerations be outright banned from foreign policymaking. A sovereign people by definition have every right to make such choices.

But if you agree with me that America is existentially secure and prosperous, you’ll join with me in thanking the nation’s lucky stars that its representative form of government creates a strong check on the misguided, gratuitously interventionist impulses of our supposed foreign policy experts — and therefore on the leaders they unfortunately still influence.