(What’s Left of) Our Economy: A New U.S. Manufacturing Growth Report That’s the Good Kind of Boring

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aerospace, aircraft, aircraft parts, automotive, Boeing, Build Back Better, CCP Virus, China, coronavirus, COVID 19, Federal Reserve, inflation-adjusted output, infrastructure, interest rates, Iran, Iran deal, Israel, Joe Manchin, machinery, manufacturing, medical devices, nuclear deal, Omicron variant, personal protective equipment, pharmaceuticals, plastics and rubber products, PPE, quantitative easing, Russia, semiconductors, stimulus, supply chains, Taiwan, tariffs, therapeutics, Trade, Ukraine, vaccines, Wuhan virus, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Today’s Federal Reserve after-inflation U.S. manufacturing data (for November) were refreshingly (though encouragingly) boring, with one exception – some genuinely eye-popping revisions in specific, high-profile industries.

Overall real manufacturing output improved on month by 0.68 percent, adding to the evidence that domestic industry has bounced back from summer and early fall doldrums caused partly by damage from Hurricane Ida and partly by a global semiconductor shortage that depressed automotive production.

And in this vein, the November results weren’t dramatically impacted by the vehicle and parts sector, whose inflation-adjusted production rose by a 2.22 percent figure that’s clearly strong but decidedly un-dramatic compared with the roller-coaster it’s been on for most of the year.

In addition, revisions for manufacturing as a whole were modest and mixed.

The list of November’s biggest monthly manufacturing growth winners indicates how broad-based industry’s sequential constant dollar output gains were in November. No fewer than six of the major manufacturing subsectors tracked by the Fed enjoyed price-adjusted production advances of more than one percent. Aside from automotive, they were aerospace and miscellaneous transportation (whose 1.64 percent increase included another strong rise in aircraft, as will be detailed below); paper (up 1.63 percent); plastics and rubber products (1.45 percent); non-metallic mineral goods (1.25 percent); and textiles (1.21 percent).

The biggest losers were petroleum and coal products (down 1.24 percent on month); machinery (off by 0.66 percent); apparel and leather goods (0.53 percent); and printing and related support activities (0.50 percent).

But even in this group, hopeful signs can be found. As RealityChek regulars know, drps in machinery production are worrisome because its products are used so widel in the rest of manufacturing and in big non-manufacturing sectors like construction and agriculture.

But the November decline followed one of those eye-popping revisions. October’s originally reported 1.27 percent sequential decrease is now judged to be a 0.59 percent increase.

Moreover, the printing and petroleum and coal products fall-offs were both preceded by October real production advances that have been downwardly revised (from 4.97 percent to 3.79 percent for the former, and from 1.41 percent to 1.18 percent for the latter) but were still impressive.

Manufacturing industries that have been prominent in the news during the pandemic generally performed worse in November, save for aircraft and parts – whose performance was spurred by news from industry giant Boeing that continues to be pretty good. (See, e.g., here and here.) After-inflation production climbed by 1.90 percent month-to-month in November, and October’s 1.43 percent increase was revised up to 1.54 percent.

Even with a second downward revision to September’s inflation-adjusted output (from 0.45 percent all the way down to a negligible 0.09 percent), constant dollar output in aircraft and parts is now 15.86 percent higher than in February, 2020 – the last full data month before the CCP Virus began seriously distorting the U.S. economy.

Pharmaceuticals and medicines, however, lost even more growth momentum. Despite major demand for and use of vaccines, their price-adjusted output dipped by 0.15 percent sequentially in November, and October’s decrease was revised from 0.51 percent to 0.76 percent. But September saw another one of these enormous revisions – from a downgraded 1.04 percent production fall to a 0.76 percent gain. All told, these industries are now 13.54 percent bigger in constant dollar terms as of November than in February, 2020.

The news was worse in the crucial medical equipment and supplies sector – which includes virus-fighting items like face masks, protective gowns, and ventilators. Real production in November was off by 0.61 percent month-to-month in November, and October’s previously reported 1.08 percent decrease is now estimated at a greater 1.91 percent. Moreover, September’s results saw their second big downgrade – first from an initially reported 1.53 percent growth to a 0.73 percent gain, and this morning to one of just 0.16 percent. So since February, 2020, after-inflation production in this sector is up a mere 0.65 percent.

As with the entire economy, the manufacturing sector is being pushed and pulled by what seems to be an unprecedented number and type of forces and government decisions. On balance, though, unless the Omicron variant of the CCP Virus prompts much more voluntary or officially mandated disruption at home or abroad than seems likeliest now, further manufacturing growth still looks like the best bet for the foreseeable future.

Although prospects for stimulus from President Biden’s Build Back Better bill seem barely on life support due to West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin’s continuing objections, and the Federal Reserve yesterday announced further reductions in its stimulative bond-buying (AKA quantitaive easing), infrastucture bill money should soon begin flowing.  Further, the central bank still made clear that heavy levels of quantitative easing will continue for months more, and is in no rush to start raising interest rates.

Most consumers still have plenty of money to spend, even though further inflation could weaken their appetites. U.S. employment levels keep rebounding strongly by most measures. Supply chain knots continue untangling, albeit not always quickly. Mr. Biden is keeping nearly all of his predecessor’s China tariffs in place, which is preventing predatory Chinese competition from taking customers from domestic manufacturers. The brightening Boeing picture will help its entire vast U.S.-based supply chain. And American and overseas demand for both CCP Virus vaccines and now therapeutics will surely keep growing whatever the rest of the domestic or global economies do.

One set of gathering clouds shouldn’t be neglected, however. I don’t mean to sound alarmist, and don’t believe conflicts are imminent, but what the investment community calls “geopolitical risk” is troublingly on the rise in Asia (due to mounting Chinese pressures on Taiwan) and Europe (due to Russia’s military buildup on the Ukraine border). Moreover, although negotiations to slow Iran’s progress toward nuclear weapons capability have resumed, this has been ongoing and nearing critical threshholds. And it’s far from clear how well a nuclear Iran would go down with Israel – just as it’s far from clear how well domestic manufacturing and the rest of the economy could withstand a second major non-economic disruption in a very few years.

Making News: New National Interest Article on Why the Foreign Policy Establishment Was Always Overrated

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academia, Afghanistan, alliances, Blob, Bretton Woods, China, Cold War, foreign policy establishment, forever wars, global financial crisis, globalism, Iran, liberal global order, Mainstream Media, Making News, Max Boot, Richard Haass, Soviet Union, The National Interest, think tanks

I’m pleased to announce that The National Interest has just published my latest article for an outside publication: an essay on why recent defenses of America’s bipartisan globalist foreign policy establishment (AKA, “The Blob”) wouldn’t hold any water even if this powerful, durable in-crowd hadn’t botched practically everything about Afghanistan. Here’s the link.

Also, a new twist today: Unfortunately, I thought some of the edits undermined the flow of the piece. I’m going to try to get at least some of them corrected. But in the meantime, to show careful readers what they were, I’m presenting below the draft as I sent it off. Let me know if you think I have some grounds for grousing. (P.S. I’m just fine with their title and love the subhead’s reference to the “poisoned well”!)

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

Why the Blob Really Has Been Unimpressive

by Alan Tonelson

So the Blob is starting to fight back. The bipartisan globalist national foreign policy establishment is being blamed both for President Biden’s hellaciously botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, and (including by the Blob-y Mr. Biden himself), for pushing the transformation of a necessary anti-terrorist operation into a naively grandiose nation-building project.

It’s time, the argument goes, to marginalize – or at least view more skeptically – this hodgepodge of former diplomats and Congressional aides, retired military officers, genuine academics, and think tank hacks that has shaped American diplomacy in two critical ways: by being used as the main personnel pool for staffing presidential administrations and House and Senate offices on rotating bases, and for serving up informal advisers for these politicians; and by dominating the list of sources used by overwhelmingly sympatico Mainstream Media journalists to report and interpret the news, and thus define for the public which foreign policy ideas are and aren’t legitimate to discuss.

“Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater!” Blob-ers are responding.

“The foreign policy establishment did get it wrong in Iraq, where the U.S. overreached,” allowed Richard Haass, who as President of the Council on Foreign Relations would arguably win a contest for Blob-er-in-Chief. “We got it wrong in Libya, we got it wrong in Vietnam. But over the last 75 years, the foreign policy establishment has gotten most things right.”

Washington Post pundit (and neoconservative apostate) Max Boot similarly has declared that “we can confidently say that, overall, the foreign policy establishment has served America well over the past 76 years.”

In other words, look past not only Afghanistan and Libya and Iraq and Vietnam but also the failure to anticipate the September 11 terrorist attack; and the long-time cluelessness about the emergence of security and economic threats from China (following the stubborn, decades-long determination to antagonize China after 1949); and a peacekeeping debacle in Somalia; and the Bay of Pigs fiasco; and the blind loyalty to an Iranian Shah hated by nearly all his subjects. Focus instead on all the – presumably more important – successes. (I’m excluding the numerous Blob-y decisions to back all manner of dictators, primarily in the developing world, and ignore human rights considerations because whatever their ethical flaws, only the Vietnam and Iran policies undermined American interests significantly.)

Paramount among them: victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War; the protectorate-alliances, foreign aid, and open trading system that keyed this triumph – in the process pacifying and democratizing Germany and Japan – fostering recovery in these former enemy dictatorships as well as the rest of Western Europe; and ushering in decades of record prosperity in these regions.

One obvious rejoinder: Today’s Blob and its most recent forerunners merit zero credit for those achievements because almost none of its members simply weren’t around or in power then. Meaning maybe America simply needs a more competent Blob?

At the same time, there’s inevitably been personnel continuity in the Blob’s ranks over time (think of recently deceased centenarian George Shultz, and the 98-year old Henry Kissinger, both still influential well into their golden years). Moreover, today’s establishment was largely groomed in Blob-y institutions, claims to be acting in that original Blob-y tradition, and has clearly remained stalwart in its advocacy of tireless international activism, and support for what it calls the liberal global order and its constituent institutions created by the older Blob generation. As a result, including those decades-old developments in judgements of today’s Blob is eminently defensible.

And in retrospect, what’s particularly revealing but neglected about these achievements is the extent to which they stemmed from circumstances almost ideally suited for foreign policy success, rather than from Blob-er genius. Globalists of the first post-World War II decades unquestionably faced serious domestic political obstacles to breaking with the country’s historic aloofness to most non-Western Hemispheric developments.

But they also enjoyed enviable advantages. Especially important was global economic predominance, which blunted much criticism on the home front by permitting subsidization of both the security and well-being of enormous foreign populations without apparent cost to American living standards or national finances.

It’s no coincidence, therefore, that as this advantage eroded, and the core Blob tactic of handling problems literally by throwing money at them and refusing to choose meaningfully between guns and butter became more problematic, the Blob’s record worsened – and undercut the intertwined domestic political and economic bases of active and passive public support for its strategies.

In fact, post-Vietnam, it’s difficult to identify any important foreign policy decision that Blob-y leaders have gotten right, or even handled reasonably well, with the exception of the first Persian Gulf War. (Ronald Reagan’s dramatic military buildup certainly helped spend and innovate the Soviets into collapse, but it was opposed by much and possibly most of the Blob, which favored continued containment and the simultaneous pursuit of arms control and detente.)

Just as important, this Blob’s very profligacy meant that many of its biggest post-Vietnam failures were economic in nature. Two leading examples – the messy collapse of the early World War II international monetary system and structural inflation and long sluggish growth that followed; and the 2007-09 global financial crisis and ensuing Great Recession.

Both crises were brought on fundamentally by global financial imbalances stemming from the Blob-ers’ stubborn refusal to support even minimal budget discipline on the foreign policy side; and from their failure to require reciprocal market access for traded goods either in the early post-World War II Bretton Woods monetary system or into its patchwork successors. And both revealed the Blob’s obliviousness to the intertwined imperatives of maintaining the national economic power needed to pay for their preferred policies responsibly; and of defining U.S. interests realistically enough to avoid needless costs and addiction to debt, inflation, or both.

Do today’s attacks, then, mean that the Blob’s demise is in sight? Not nearly likely enough. After all, it’s survived its decades-long string of blunders with its status pretty much intact. It’s bound to be keep being replenished by the same elite universities whose relevant faculty members are overwhelmingly Blob-y themselves. There’s no sign that their corporate funders are backing away from the think tanks that keep its many of its members employed when they’re out of public office. And its record will surely keep being reported principally by a news media that’s thoroughly Blob-y itself. That – frighteningly – leaves a foreign policy catastrophe inflicting lasting damage on the nation as America’s best hope for replacing the Blob even with simply a more genuinely diverse source of experience and expertise.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: “Anonymous” Inanity on China

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Atlantic Council, Biden, China, China Strateg Group, decoupling, Donald Trump, Foreign Affairs, George F. Kennan, globalism, Iran, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, The Long Telegram, The Longer Telegram, X Article, Xi JInPing

How lucky for President Biden that, just as he’s announced a wide-ranging review of U.S. China policy (after he and his supposedly fellow foreign policy mavens spent the entire presidential campaign lambasting Donald Trump’s initiatives and clearly conveying that they knew exactly how to fix these alleged blunders), a wavelet of advice has appeared offering answers, at least at the broad brush level.

How unfortunate for the United States, though, that so little of this advice has any prospect of advancing and defending American interests vis-a-vis China, much less improving on the Trump efforts to neutralize the China threat. In fact, if Mr. Biden follows his longstanding Beijing-coddling instincts and generally heeds the authors, the United States is bound to become more vulnerable and more beholden to the People’s Republic than ever.

Two blueprints for the President to follow have emerged in recent weeks: a memo from an anonymous author who clearly views him or herself as a latter day George F. Kennan; and a collective effort from a “China Strategy Group” dominated by Silicon Valley figures (and co-chaired by Google co-founder Eric Schmidt). The first is the most easily disposed of, and will be the subject of today’s post. Tomorrow I’ll discuss the Group’s China grope.

Kennan, in case you’ve forgotten, was the mid-twentieth century American diplomat whose analyses of Soviet power and behavior (including an early 1946 memo written during his stint in Moscow that became known as “The Long Telegram”) powerfully shaped the Cold War strategy of containment adopted by Washington. He was by no means perfect, but in my view amply deserves his reputation as one of the most incisive foreign policy analysts in American history – which is why if he read the new and arrogantly titled “The Longer Telegram,” he’d probably be hard-pressed to decide whether to laugh or cry.

The most eye-catching proposal made by the author (whose desire for anonymity apes that displayed Kennan in a 1947 article that grew out of “The Long Telegram” that he published in the journal Foreign Affairs as “X”): urging that rather than focus on broadly changing China’s totalitarian system of government and control over the economy, or targeting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in particular as Public Enemy Number One, U.S. policy recognize Chinese leader Xi Jinping and his inner circle as the dominant game changer that has turned the People’s Republic and its practices from a “manageable” challenge into today’s mortal danger not only to the United States but to the entire world.

I actually agree with the author that prompting Chinese reform of any kind is a fool’s quest – a prime reason that I regard substantially decoupling America’s economy from China’s as the best way to ensure that the nation can handle whatever problems Beijing creates. It was also heartening to see “Anonymous” recognize that dealing with China successfully will be that much harder for Washington if it keeps going out of its way to demonize Russia – which has clearly become a Democratic Party staple.

But concentrating U.S. China policy “through the principal lens of Xi himself” and seeking to capitalize on “significant” opposition within the CCP to “Xi’s leadership and its vast ambitions” in order to “return [China] to its pre-2013 path—i.e., the pre-Xi strategic status quo” suffers from at least two glaringly obvious flaws.

The first is Anonymous’ belief that however numerous China’s challenges to U.S. interests before Xi gained control, “they were manageable and did not represent a serious violation of the US-led international order.” In fact, even the author him/herself doesn’t seem to believe this.

If he or she did, why admit that the current Chinese challenge, “to some extent, has been gradually emerging over the last two decades”? And that that “China has long had an integrated internal strategy for handling the United States….” And that pursuing its goals “nationally, bilaterally, regionally, multilaterally, and globally….has been China’s approach for decades.” And that “What links” today’s China threat and that posed by the Soviet Union in particular during the early Cold War is that “the CCP, like the former CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union], is an avowedly Leninist party with a profoundly Marxist worldview”?

Have Xi’s ambitions magnified the threat? Of course. But – as Anonymous also admits – not because Chinese leaders’ goals have fundamentally changed, but because growing economic and therefore military strength have brought them within reach.

In the author’s own words,

“China has undergone a dramatic economic rise in recent decades, and it is using its economic power to engage in coercive practices and to become the center of global innovation….China is transforming its economic heft into military strength, modernizing its military and developing capabilities to counter the United States’ ability to project power in the western Pacific.”

And although China has generated much of this impressive progress through its own devices, it’s also indisputable that its closely related economic, technological, and military advances stem from the U.S. and other free world resources and knowhow that flooded into China precisely when the bipartisan Washington consensus viewed any possible dangers emanating from Beijing as “manageable.” In other words, whether knowingly or not, Anonymous in effect is arguing for a return to the policies that helped create the problem he’s (correctly) identified. And P.S. Since he or she is described as “a former senior government official with deep expertise and experience dealing with China,” chances are the author had more than a minor hand in crafting this failed approach.

The second fatal flaw in “The Longer Telegram” is its assumption that American foreign policymakers understand enough “about the fault lines of internal Chinese politics” to manipulate them into bringing back those allegedly manageable pre-Xi leaders. To which anyone with even the skimpiest knowledge of American diplomacy should be responding, “Remember Iran.”

For since that country’s 1979 revolution replaced a generally pro-American monarch with a zealously anti-American Shiite Islamic theocracy, U.S. leaders have tried repeatedly to find influential moderates that would help reshape the new regime’s behavior. Because the United States knew so little about the internal politics and fault lines of this leadership, all these efforts have failed. Does Anonymous really believe that Washington’s knowledge of China’s even more secretive leadership is any better?

The Atlantic Council, the globalist Washington, D.C. think tank that published “The Longer Telegram,” calls it “one of the most insightful and rigorous examinations to date of Chinese geopolitical strategy and how an informed American strategy would address the challenges of China’s own strategic ambitions.”

Actually, its signature recommendation is so internally contradictory and naive that I don’t blame the author for wanting to stay Anonymous.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Biden’s Incoherent Iran Nuclear Policy

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Antony Blinken, Biden, Donald Trump, Iran, Iran nuclear deal, Israel, Jake Sullivan, JCPOA, Middle East, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Persian Gulf, Sunnis

In case you dismiss most or all statements during campaigns by office-seekers and their aides as complete baloney, you should take a look at some transcripts recently released by the Hudson Institute of interviews last year with then Joe Biden foreign policy advisers Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan – who have gone on to become President Biden’s Secretary of State and national security adviser, respectively.

The trouble is that these transcripts make plain as day, among other points, that the Biden view of handling Iran and its nuclear weapons ambitions makes little sense from a standpoint of simple common sense.

The Sullivan transcript – recorded last May – is by far the more thoughtful and serious of the two, but mainly in terms of revealing the fundamental confusion of the Biden outlook.

The central questions surrounding the Iran nuclear issue stem from the “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action” (JCPOA) signed during the Obama years by the United States, Tehran, China, Germany, Russia, France, and the United Kingdom, which obliged Iran to accept limits on its nuclear research program in return for relief from longstanding international economic sanctions. The Obama administration insisted that even though the Iran nuclear limits would end in 2025, the agreement valuably put off the day when Tehran could produce a bomb on very short notice, and therefore in theory until then defused the greatest potential Iranian threat to American and Middle Eastern security; that a calmer atmosphere could help diplomatic efforts to deal with Iran’s other belligerent behavior; and that the deal represented the best outcome Washington could achieve jointly with other great powers – which were always capable of frustrating unilateral U.S. Iran strategies they considered too confrontational.

Critics (like, eventually, me) countered that the deal left open too many loopholes that could enable Iran to keep making substantial progress toward nuclear weapons capability; that the sanctions relief would give Iran the economic wherewithal to intensify its efforts to gain hegemony over much of the Middle East and Persian Gulf; and that the United States on its own had ample power to cripple Iran’s economic ability to wage proxy wars and sponsor terrorism. And because he basically agreed with the critics, Donald Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018.

The results have been mixed. Unilateral U.S. sanctions have indeed ravaged Iran’s economy – and possibly put at least some constraints on its aggression and subversion, along with other dangerous weapons programs like its drive to create ever more effective, longer-range ballistic missiles. But this behavior has by no means stopped, and the Trump administration’s belief that the pain would foster regime change has been totally far-fetched so far. Further, to protest these sanctions – which Iran calls a violation of the JCPOA – Tehran has said that its own commitments are now null and void, and has taken a series of steps that JCPOA supporters charge demonstrate the failure of the Trump approach, and that deal opponents say Iran was taking clandestinely anyway – or was bound to.

Like his boss (who of course served as Barack Obama’s Vice President), Sullivan is a JCPOA supporter, and the new President has made clear his determination to return to the deal in the belief that Iran will slow down its nuclear research once again. But Sullivan’s remarks also reinforced the case against the deal by unwittingly acknowledging that the Obama-Biden hopes for the kind of changed Iranian behavior that would bring lasting benefits to the region are thoroughly in vain.

Here’s one of two key passages:

“[T]o me, the real issue with Iran, the real limitation on Iran in the region, has not been the availability of cash [i.e., the effectiveness of sanctions]. It’s been the availability of opportunity. And where opportunities have arisen, they’ve taken them. And that was true in the ’80s. It was true in the ’90s. It was true in the 2000s. It was during the 2010s. It remains true today. And even under massive sanction, the Iranians have gotten more aggressive in the Gulf, have remained just as aggressive in Syria and Lebanon, have increased their activities in respect to the Houthis in Yemen, and all of that while under massive economic sanction from the United States.”

I agree with Sullivan’s observation that Iran is so determined to achieve in the Middle East objectives considered dangerous by a broad bipartisan U.S. consensus that it’s pursued this agenda despite paying a major economic price. But does this kind of Iran sound like a country likely to reform in the slightest by the time the JCPOA runs out? Worse, the failure of sanctions to bring Iran to heel, by no means renders inconsequential the resources they’ve denied the country. It’s all too reasonable to conclude that permitting Iran to do business normally with the rest of the world will simply make an aggressive regime much wealthier, and thus able to act more aggressively. As political scientists would say, the result would be a country whose malign intentions haven’t changed but whose malign capabilities are have greatly increased.

The second key passage:

“[M]y view is, if you can take one of the big threats off the board, the Iranian nuclear program, take it off the board, and then use the tools available at your disposal, none of which were stripped from us by the JCPOA, to go after Iran in the region. And to the extent you want to make diplomacy, the central feature of stopping Iran’s malign activities, get the regional actors at the table with the Iranians and stand behind them with some pressure to try to produce a deescalation, say between Iran and Saudi Arabia.”

Here the problem is Sullivan’s apparent belief that, faced with the prospect of being “gone after” by the United States and its other bitterest rivals, Iran will dutifully comply with the JCPOA for the entire length of its duration – which will leave it highly vulnerable to “pressure” to abandon goals that the previous Sullivan passage identified as positively foundational.

It’s far more likely – and I’d call it a virtual certainty – that Iran will do everything possible to prevent this kind of vulnerability/ As a result it can be expected to take every opportunity in the foreseeable future to make the fastest possible progress toward the nuclear weapons threshhold whether the nuclear deal is resumed or not, devoting many of resources made available by sanctions removal to that effort, and continuing even faster (and eventually building a nice sized stockpile) once the JCPOA expires.

Not that there’s no reason for optimism from an American standpoint. For the above scenario makes a U.S. military pullout from the terminally dysfunctional Middle East/Persian Gulf region more appealing than ever. Another reason for optimism for those still worried about Iran despite decisive recent reasons to disengage, like substantial American energy independence:  Trump’s oft-voiced (but only partly-at-best fulfilled) desire to exit had clearly prompted Iran’s Sunni Arab and (nuclear armed) Israeli foes to kick into the next gear their own tacit alliance, which seems more than capable of countering Iranian threats.

Unfortunately, even though in his interview, Blinken stated that a Biden administration would seek to deemphasize the region in U.S. grand strategy in order to focus more on East Asia, President Biden seems bent on keeping the U.S.’ armed regional presence impressively sized.  Can anyone say “Tar Baby” – again?

Following Up: Still No Biden Learning Curve in Sight on the Middle East or China

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America First, China, energy revolution, Following Up, fossil fuels, globalism, Iran, Iran nuclear deal, Israel, Joe Biden, Middle East, oil, Phase One, Saudi Arabia, Sunnis, tariffs, The New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman, Trade, trade war, Trump

Talk about great timing! Just two days ago, I analyzed New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman’s new offering warning Joe Biden not to rush back into the Iran nuclear deal because this step could undo lots of the progress made by President Trump’s America First foreign policy approach in greatly improving the prospects for advancing and protecting U.S. interests in the region.

And just this morning, Friedman has published a piece based on lengthy interview with the apparent President-elect making clear that he has no interest in learning these valuable lessons of the recent past. In addition, Biden confirmed that his China policy plans are just as dominated by cynical doubletalk these days as during the 2020 election campaign.

As Friedman argued on November 29, Mr. Trump’s message that Israel and the Arab world’s Sunni Muslim monarchies (mainly Saudi Arabia) should no longer count on the United States to fight their battles accomplished this critical objective: It

“forced Israel and the key Sunni Arab states to become less reliant on the United States and to think about how they must cooperate among themselves over new threats — like Iran — rather than fighting over old causes — like Palestine. This may enable America to secure its interests in the region with much less blood and treasure of its own. It could be Trump’s most significant foreign policy achievement.”

But as Biden made clear in his conversation with Friedman, he either can’t or refuses to understand the key development that validates the Trump approach – the U.S. fossil fuel production revolution that has eliminated America’s overriding reason for treating the Middle East as a vital national security interest, and enabled Washington to adopt a Trump-ian take-it-or-leave-it approach safely.

Not that domestic energy independence means that completely ignoring Middle East affairs is always the best response. But it certainly does mean much greater scope for Washington to advance objectives with varying degrees of importance (notably, preventing a nuclear-armed Iran from dominating the region) in ways far less risky and costly than the lengthy wars and immense military commitments that have dominated globalist strategy.

And as Friedman has indicated, the President has started lifting the United States off its dangerous hook by leaving its Middle East allies no choice but to stop quarreling over trifles (like the fate of the Palestinians) and work together to take responsibility for their own genuinely critical and shared interests.

Biden, however, still believes that America remains so dependent on “getting some stability” in this long-unstable region that deep entanglement in Middle East affairs is unavoidable. Just as worrisome: He’s laid out a genuinely Rube Goldberg-esque rationale for treating the Iran nuclear deal as his strategy’s linchpin. As Friedman describes his blueprint (based on this interview and other conversations with top Biden aides):

“[O]nce the [nuclear] deal is restored by both sides, there will have to be, in very short order, a round of negotiations to seek to lengthen the duration of the restrictions on Iran’s production of fissile material that could be used to make a bomb — originally 15 years — as well as to address Iran’s malign regional activities, through its proxies in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

“Ideally, the Biden team would like to see that follow-on negotiation include not only the original signatories to the deal — Iran, the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France, Germany and the European Union — but also Iran’s Arab neighbors, particularly Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.”

To which the only reasonable response is “Good luck with that” – especially given the lack of consensus on Middle East goals among this highly diverse group of countries, and, equally important, the wildly varying stakes in success between governments inside and outside of the Middle East,

On China, the big and encouraging news is that Biden has decided not to remove the steep, sweeping Trump tariffs “immediately.” That position of course makes at best little sense given how disastrous he called these levies’ impact.

Otherwise, the former Vice President showed that his China policy statements could be even more thoroughly dominated by doubletalk and cluelessness than they were during the campaign.

Most troubling was how Biden contended (correctly) that “leverage” is the make-or-break factor in negotiating with China, and then quickly added “in my view, we don’t have it yet.” Even leaving aside Beijing’s at-least-suggestive decision to sign a Phase One trade deal whoppingly one-sided in favor of a country whose markets it needs desperately to secure adequate levels of prosperity, why did the apparent President-elect go out of his way to advertise supposed American weakness? Indeed, this perverse practice looks like an emerging habit of the Biden foreign policy camp.

As Biden told Friedman, he continues insisting that this leverage can be created in large measure by creating a “coherent strategy” behind which the United States and its European and Asian allies can unite. But as I’ve pointed out repeatedly, many of these countries (notably, Germany, Japan, and South Korea) have made too much money trading with China at the U.S.’ expense to support any position but a complete return to the pre-Trump era of actively coddling and enabling the People’s Republic.  (See, e.g., this analysis.)

At the same time, the apparent President-elect deserves credit for recognizing that gaining sufficient leverage to deal with China successfully requires (in Friedman’s words) “developing a bipartisan consensus at home for some good old American industrial policy — massive, government-led investments in American research and development, infrastructure and education to better compete with China.”

Finally, however, Biden still accepts the completely unjustified pre-Trump view that, without the kind of one-sided, pro-U.S. enforcement mechanism at the heart of the Phase One agreement, Washington can negotiate away most of China’s wide-ranging trade predation with precisely enough worded paper agreements. As I’ve explained, the only genuine hope for progress along these lines is the kind of dispute-resolution system set up in Phase One – in which Washington serves as judge, jury, and court of appeals. 

A few days before he spoke with Friedman, Biden told another journalist that he knows the nation and world are “totally different” from his Vice Presidential days and that therefore his administration would not be “a third Obama term.”  His conversation with Friedman, though, strongly indicated that he meant “except for the Middle East and China.”  

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Another (Really) Surprising Endorsement of America First

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Afghanistan, allies, America First, Gaza, globalism, Golan Heights, Iran, Iran deal, Iran nuclear deal, Israel, Jerusalem, Joe Biden, Middle East, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Palestinians, Saudi Arabia, Sunnis, The New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman, Trump, West Bank

It’s one thing for globalists in politics and the think tanks and the media and even appointees of apparent President-elect Joe Biden to admit tacitly that the kind of America First-y strategy unevenly pursued by Donald Trump is the only sensible approach to U.S. foreign policy. (As I’ve noted recently here and here.)

It’s something else entirely for a major cheerleader for pre-Trump policies (and an outspoken Never Trumper) explicitly to credit such Trump-ism for constructively realigning the geopolitics of a region best known lately for spawning major threats to U.S. interests and epically failed official American responses in dramatically favorable ways.

This shock was delivered yesterday by New York Times pundit Thomas L. Friedman, who holds a special place in the globalist pantheon.  For decades, he’s touted the virtues of an increasingly globalized and benign world that was rapidly leaving the United States no choice but to stop clinging to national sovereignty, and to leave the big decisions impacting the safety and prosperity of the American people to the private sector visionaries spearheading such progress in technology and finance, and to the disinterested supposed experts, foreign and American alike, who staffed international bureaucracies.  (See here and here in particular.)   

It was amazing enough to see Friedman warn apparent President-elect Joe Biden not to rush the United States back into an Iran nuclear deal lauded by the Obama-style Never Trumpers (including the former Vice President) who negotiated it as the crowning glory of global diplomatic history. Perhaps that’s because one subject in which Friedman’s expertise is truly genuine is the Middle East, where his decades of coverage include many years on the ground. So quite sensibly, he noted that the region has changed dramatically in the years since Biden was in power.

But more amazing still was Friedman’s contention that the main agent of this change – which “may enable America to secure its interests in the region with much less blood and treasure of its own” – has been Mr. Trump’s transformation of U.S. policy.

Friedman focuses on the President’s Trump’s decisions in the fall of 2019, when Iranian aggression against U.S. ally Saudi Arabia threatened to spark yet another regional conflict into which America could well be dragged.

But rather than order the U.S. military to jump to Saudi Arabia’s defense, the President announced in October, “We are sending troops and other things to the Middle East to help Saudi Arabia. But — are you ready? Saudi Arabia, at my request, has agreed to pay us for everything we’re doing. That’s a first.”

And as Friedman makes emphatically clear, it was a first based on a revolutionary (by hidebound pre-Trump U.S. foreign policy standards) insight, and one for which Americansshould be deeply grateful. In the author’s words, the President’s announcement sent the following message:

“Dear Saudis, America is now the world’s biggest oil producer; we’re getting out of the Middle East; happy to sell you as many weapons as you can pay cash for, but don’t count on us to fight your battles. You want U.S. troops? Show me the money.”

And the results? According to Friedman:

“In effect, Trump forced Israel and the key Sunni Arab states to become less reliant on the United States and to think about how they must cooperate among themselves over new threats — like Iran — rather than fighting over old causes — like Palestine. This may [as noted above] enable America to secure its interests in the region with much less blood and treasure of its own. It could be Trump’s most significant foreign policy achievement.”

Actually, Trump’s departure from the dangerously stale globalist conventional wisdom began a good deal earlier, with decisions like his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and movement of the U.S. Embassy to that historic city, endorsement of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and support for Israeli settlements on the long-occupied West Bank of the Jordan River.

Combined with Mr. Trump’s determination to keep the United States an oil production powerhouse, these moves also revealed that Washington was no longer going to permit Arab regimes in effect to have their cake and eat it, too at America’s expense — using the threat of Arab public opinion exploding and radicalizing over the West Bank and equally occupied Gaza to both (1) sustain open-ended U.S. military support, and (2) thereby continue indulging their ideological determination to keep their embryonic ties with Israel as covert as they were limited.

Something else Friedman should have mentioned: All these Trump decisions have been strongly opposed not only by most American globalists, but by the European allies that Biden is so determined to woo.

I personally still can’t give Mr. Trump an “A” on Middle East policy — not while he still hasn’t put his foot down and pulled nearly all American troops out of Afghanistan over his own military advisers’ objections, and while the United States still maintains way too any forces in the region overall.  But he’s at least pointed U.S. policy in the right direction — as even a committed globalist like Friedman has just told the nation, and the likely next President.      

Im-Politic: In Case You Still Doubt It’s a China Virus

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China, China virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, decoupling, elites, globlalism, Hong Kong, Im-Politic, Iran, Italy, pandemics, Taiwan, The Epoch Times, Trump

Yesterday’s RealityChek post explained why Americans looking for current domestic scapegoats for the sluggish China Virus outbreak response are barking up the wrong tree. But despite the predictable criticisms from globalism- and political correctness-happy elites and the Mainstream Media journalists who follow their cues, the search for foreign scapegoats is absolutely legitimate – primarily because one country above all has unmistakably earned the title: China.

Skeptical? Then check out this editorial from The Epoch Times. As it compellingly demonstrates, “Where Ties With Communist China Are Close, the Coronavirus Follows.”

More specifically, although the editorial writers note that numerous drivers lie behind COVID19’s spread, “the heaviest-hit regions outside China all share a common thread: close or lucrative relations with the communist regime in Beijing.”

One reason I found the editorial especially important was its explanation for the virus’ concentration in Italy. Some convincing explanations for high levels of Italian mortality rates have come out, but I’ve yet to run across any material on why China Virus became so common in Italy to begin with. The Epoch Times spotlights some major reasons:

“Italy, the most heavily affected country outside China as of March 10, was the first (and only) G-7 [“Group of 7” – an official organization of the world’s seven biggest economies] nation to sign onto the PRC’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI, also known as One Belt, One Road). In an attempt to prop up its weakening economy, Italy has also sought to capture the Chinese market for selling its luxury goods….

“Italy also has signed scores of sister-city agreements with China, with the cities of Milan, Venice, and Bergamo included among them. These are the areas hardest-hit by the virus.”

China ties also seem largely responsible for the coronavirus’ outsize impact on Iran:

“The Iranian regime has had a comprehensive strategic partnership with China since 2016, and its ties with Beijing began years before that. In violation of international sanctions, Iran has imported embargoed materials from China, while continuing to sell oil to the PRC. The Islamic Republic allowed flights in and out of four major Chinese cities until the end of February.”

And reinforcing the case for a vital Iran-China connection is this Wall Street Journal piece. It reports that the Iranian city of Qom, which Iran’s government calls the country’s COVID19 starting point, has been the site of numerous infrastructure projects built by Chinese engineers and technicians as part of that Belt and Road program.

As the Times notes, even South Korea’s government – whose comprehensive and seemingly testing program has garnered widespread global praise – seems to have set itself up for China Virus troubles “for refusing to ban Chinese tourists at large and instead only barring entry for those who recently traveled to Hubei Province, the epicenter of the epidemic in China.”

Don’t forget, moreover, that one big reason surely has concerned South Korea’s long surging economic relations with China – which assembles lots of high-value manufactured goods containing numerous South Korean parts and components. The same goes for Japan, another coronavirus hotspot.

The Epoch Times‘ conclusion is also borne out by the experiences of two other places with extensive economic relations with China that seem to have the disease contained: Hong Kong and Taiwan. (And I don’t mean to suggest that the latter isn’t a “country.”)

The city, located right next to another China Virus epicenter, Guangdong Province, has basically shut its border with the People’s Republic. Taiwan “began to board planes and assess passengers on Dec. 31, 2019, after Wuhan authorities first confirmed the outbreak. In early February, Taiwan banned entry to foreign nationals who have traveled to the PRC.”

Of course, now that the virus has spread far beyond China, government authorities need to focus on more domestically focused strategies – although plugging remaining foreign travel gaps, as President Trump approved in his otherwise unsuccessful Wednesday night Oval Office address, can certainly be justified in many circumstances.

Moreover, China’s primo role in not only the coronavirus outbreak but the previous Bird Flu and ongoing Asian Swine Flu episodes indicates that there’s something about China that makes it particularly (if not uniquely) plague-prone. As a result, further curbs on commerce with the PRC seem imperative even leaving aside (as no one should) Beijing’s recent threat to cut off shipments of vital medicines and their chemical ingredients to the United States. In other words, keeping the focus on China’s responsibility will help American leaders keep and intensify their focus on desirable, broader economic decoupling.

And China’s disgraceful effort to place blame for the virus on the United States amounts to a major additional reason to spotlight the above transnational coronavirus links.

“Blame games” in politics and policy are often condemned, and surely they’re often wrongheaded or overdone. But they also serve the valuable purpose of clarifying thought, accurately identifying problems, and – as suggested above – speeding the discovery of effective solutions. That’s why The Epoch Times editorial gives me more reason than ever to keep calling the coronavirus the China Virus – and why the same should go for all Americans.    

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: How Post-Soleimani, Trump Schooled the Globalists Again

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America First, Bill Clinton, Bosnia, Colin L. Powell, Democrats, deterrence, globalism, Iran, Madeleine Albright, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Soleimani, Trump

I’d hardly call President Trump a foreign policy mastermind. But since his 2016 presidential campaign started gaining strength, it’s been clear to me that his instincts in the field are exactly what a country like the United States needs, and this conviction has been strengthened considerably by a little remarked-on point he made in his announcement last week of the killing of Iranian military and terrorist commander Qassem Soleimani.

Here’s the remark:

“The fact that we have this great military and equipment…does not mean we have to use it.  We do not want to use it.  American strength, both military and economic, is the best deterrent.”

Sounds pretty obvious, right? But it’s been anything but obvious to America’s globalist foreign policy establishment, and especially to many in its liberal wing – which could very well regain the White House if a Democratic candidate like former Vice President Joe Biden or Indianapolis Mayor Pete Buttigieg wins November’s election. And that would be terrible news, as these establishment globalist liberals’ failure to agree indicates that they might return the nation to the days when it plunged into all sorts of foreign crises that had no potential to bolster American security, and much potential to become costly, bloody quagmires.

My evidence? An absolutely seminal exchange from the early 1990s between then U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright (who went on to become Secretary of State) and Colin L. Powell – then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who would also go on to run Foggy Bottom.

During former President Bill Clinton’s first terms, Albright and Powell disagreed sharply on the merits of the United States intervening militarily in the Bosnia war – one of many civil conflicts in the Balkans triggered by the post-Cold War breakup of Yugoslavia. Albright was a leader of the hawks and Powell had long championed a view that the United States should use its armed forces only when genuinely vital national interests were at stake.

During one of their debates, Albright asked Powell a question that was shockingly moronic even by the dismal standards of globalists generally: “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”

In his memoirs, Powell wrote that Albright’s question almost gave him “an aneurysm.” And it should be screamingly obvious why. Albright, who has studied international affairs her entire adult life, had apparently never heard of, or forgot, the concept of “deterrence.”

Thank goodness she wasn’t in power during one of the Cold War nuclear crises, like that over Cuba in 1962. Can you imagine any of former President John F. Kennedy’s advisers asking “What’s the point of having these superb nuclear weapons if we can’t use them?” And most worrisomely Albright – who remains influential in top Democratic political circles – has been proudly unrepentant.

Even more important, Albright’s position shows that she’s clueless about a fundamental intellectual key to U.S. foreign policy success – understanding that a superpower is defined first and foremost by what it is (i.e, by the assets it can bring to bear regarding overseas challenges and opportunities) not by what it does (how and how energetically it uses those assets). 

That is, for a country as geopolitically secure and economically self-sufficient as the United States, what matters most is focusing on building the strength (in all dimensions, including the power to deter any aggressors) needed to enable it to survive and prosper in a world certain to remain dangerous, rather than working overtime figuring out ways to keep using that strength – especially when there’s no obvious need.   

Now Powell’s a globalist, too – but he clearly comes from the wing that’s at least recognized that national interests (though he and his ilk invariably define them way too broadly) should be driving the use of foreign policy tools, not the availability of those tools (let alone list of uses of American arms and resources that may be desirable to some extent, to some Americans, but are hardly essential – like the Bosnia mess and other humanitarian tragedies in which the Clinton-ites initially engaged the nation).

Trump’s Iran remarks unmistakably associate him with that far wiser Powell approach – including in situations unlikely to go nuclear. They also signal that he gets it on the real nature of a superpower.

So don’t doubt for a minute that the President’s quasi-America First-type foreign policies will continue to be much less coherent and efficiently implemented than is desirable. But don’t doubt for a minute that his (sort of) Powell-like instincts boost the odds that the United States won’t get bogged down in debilitating and unnecessary quagmires.

In other words, everyone hoping for an American foreign policy displaying some kind of post-Iraq War learning curve should remember that, for all Mr. Trump’s faults, the United States can always do much worse in its presidential choices, in fact has done much worse – and could well again.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: So Far, So Good for Trump on Iran

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America First, globalism, Iran, Middle East, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, oil, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Soleimani, terrorism, Trump

On the one hand, anyone hoping for the success of President Trump’s America First foreign policies (which, as I’ve written, could be a lot more America First-y), would be dumb as a post to jog a victory lap following Mr. Trump’s remarks this morning about the situation in Iran and the Middle East.

On the other hand, any American genuinely hoping for the security of his country and not blinded by Trump Derangement Syndrome can’t help but be impressed by how encouragingly events in the Middle East have unfolded since the killing of Qassem Soleimani, who had commanded Iran’s military efforts to expand its influence throughout the region.

First, all signs indicate that the Soleimani killing has delivered to Iran (and probably its proxies) two messages as vital as they’ve been convincing: If you kill Americans, or attack American embassies and other regional and other foreign assets, the leaders who planned these actions will get the axe. If this interpretation is wrong, then the Trump critics will need to explain why Iran retaliated by “targeting” Iraqi bases with accurate ballistic missiles but then missing the mark – conveniently avoiding striking the U.S. forces housed there.

The Never Trump-ers will also need to explain a stunning statement from an Iranian government that has never displayed any hesitancy about personalizing its conflict with the United States: Foreign Minister Javad Zarif’s claim that the President has been fed misinformation about Soleimani and his country’s foreign policy. If that wasn’t a peace, or de-escalation feeler, I don’t know what could be.

Therefore, the immediate bottom line seems awfully favorable to the United States: Iran lost a leader described as the country’s second most important political figure, and an American ally (for lack of a better term for Iraq) lost some structures.

Moreover, Iran hasn’t even entirely gotten away scot free with last night’s actions. Mr. Trump announced tighter sanctions against an economy that’s already being decimated by U.S.-spearheaded curbs on trade and investment. He announced a pressure campaign to secure more involvement in the Middle East by America’s NATO allies – who defied many Never Trumper predictions and generally lined up with the United States both on the Soleimani killing (over which they shed no tears) and on Iran’s retaliation, and who have a much greater stake in Middle East stability. And the President declared that further U.S. responses haven’t been ruled out (although if they take the form of cyber assaults, we may never hear about them, at least for many years).

Meanwhile, let’s review – for now, anyway – how many Never Trumper talking points stand as truly loony and indeed downright disgraceful:

>that the President is too psychologically unstable and specifically insecure to avoid plunging the United States into an endless cycle of retaliation and counter-retaliation;

>that the Soleimani killing was a “wag the dog” effort to distract the nation’s attention from impeachment and even to spark a rally-round-the-flag popular reaction that would aid his reelection campaign; and

>that because of the President’s incompetence, the Trump administration’s foreign policy decision-making apparatus is dangerously chaotic.

This Trump success doesn’t validate the President’s entire Middle East policy by any means. First and foremost, the region remains too dysfunctional and explosive to justify confidence in any optimistic predictions.

More specifically, however, as I’ve complained elsewhere, Mr. Trump still seems wed to the globalist goals of both protecting the Middle East against Iranian aggression, and fostering the region’s “peace and stability” – through a combination of more U.S. forces for the near-term future, anyway; more effective cooperation with regional allies; more of that aforementioned involvement by America’s fellow members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). In a phrase, “Not gonna happen.”

Additionally, this conviction is all the more puzzling given the President’s statement today that

“Over the last three years, under my leadership, our economy is stronger than ever before and America has achieved energy independence.  These historic accomplishments changed our strategic priorities.  These are accomplishments that nobody thought were possible.  And options in the Middle East became available.  We are now the number-one producer of oil and natural gas anywhere in the world.  We are independent, and we do not need Middle East oil.”

Even better, the observation was made in the context of seeking a greater regional role for countries remaining highly dependent on these energy supplies.

Yes, a terrorism threat remains. But as I’ve also written, it’s ultimately (meaning ASAP) much better handled by further securing America’s own borders rather than by chasing endlessly mushrooming Jihadist groups around a completely failed region. And if you’re worried about Israel, there can be no legitimate doubt that the Israelis can handle themselves with continued American military aid – especially since Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu just again made clear (if accidentally) that the country has a nuclear arsenal.

In other words, Mr. Trump’s latest Iran-related gambit combined some elements of operational America First-ism (a focus on actions that affected American lives) and of rhetorical globalism. The more closely he hews to the former, and relegates the latter to political cover for an eventual wind-down of decades of often disastrously counterproductive U.S. intervention, the more grateful his countrymen will have cause to be.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Trump’s Record and the Bolton Effect

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Afghanistan, alliances, America First, Asia-Pacific, Barack Obama, China, Europe, extended deterrence, globalism, Iran, Iran deal, Iraq, Israel, Japan, John Bolton, Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Kim Jong Un, Middle East, neoconservatives, North Korea, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Palestinians, Republicans, South Korea, Syria, Trump

With John Bolton now out as President Trump’s national security adviser, it’s a great time to review the Trump foreign policy record so far. My grade? Though disappointing in some important respects, it’s been pretty good. Moreover, Bolton’s departure signals that performance could improve significantly, at least from the kind of America First perspective on which Mr. Trump ran during his 2016 campaign. That’s less because of Bolton’s individual influence than because what his (clearly forced) exist tells us about the President’s relationship with the Republican Party and conservative establishment.

There’s no doubt that the Trump foreign policy record is seriously lacking in major, game-changing accomplishments. But that’s a globalist, and in my view, wholly misleading standard for judging foreign policy effectiveness. As I’ve written previously, the idea that U.S. foreign policy is most effective when it’s winning wars and creating alliances and ending crises and creating new international regimes and the like makes sense only for those completely unaware – or refusing to recognize – that its high degrees of geopolitical security and economic self-reliance greatly undercut the need for most American international activism. Much more appropriate measures of success include more passive goals like avoiding blunders, building further strength and wealth (mainly through domestic measures), and reducing vulnerabilities. (Interestingly, former President Obama, a left-of-center globalist, saltily endorsed the first objective by emphasizing – privately, to be sure – how his top foreign policy priority was “Don’t do stupid s–t.”)     

And on this score, the President can take credit for keeping campaign promises and enhancing national security. He’s resisted pressure from Bolton and other right-of-center globalists to plunge the country much more deeply militarily into the wars that have long convulsed Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq, and seems determined to slash the scale of U.S. involvement in the former – after nineteen years.

He’s exposed the folly of Obama’s approach to preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Although Tehran has threatening to resume several operations needed to create nuclear explosives material since Mr. Trump pulled the United States out of the previous administration’s multilateral Iran deal, it’s entirely possible that the agreement contained enough loopholes to permit such progress anyway. Moreover, the President’s new sanctions, their devastating impact on Iran’s economy, and the inability of the other signatories of Obama’s multilateral Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action to circumvent them have both debunked the former President’s assumption that the United States lacked the unilateral power to punish Iran severely for its nuclear program and ambitions, and deprived Tehran of valuable resources for causing other forms of trouble throughout the Middle East.

Mr. Trump taught most of the rest of the world another valuable lesson about the Middle East when he not only recognized the contested city of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, but actually moved the U.S. Embassy there. For decades, American presidential contenders from both parties had promised to endorse what many of Israel’s supporters called its sovereign right to choose its own capital, but ultimately backed down in the face of warnings that opinion throughout the Arab world would be explosively inflamed, that American influence in the Middle East would be destroyed, and U.S. allies in the region and around the world antagonized and even fatally alienated.

But because the President recognized how sadly outdated this conventional wisdom had become (for reasons I first explained here), he defied the Cassandras, and valuably spotlighted how utterly powerless and friendless that Palestinians had become. That they’re no closer to signing a peace agreement with Israel hardly reflects an American diplomatic failure. It simply reveals how delusional they and especially their leaders remain.

Nonetheless, Mr. Trump’s Middle East strategy does deserve criticism on one critical ground: missing an opportunity. That is, even though he’s overcome much Congressional and even judicial opposition and made some progress on strengthening American border security, he’s shown no sign of recognizing the vital America First-type insight holding that the nation’s best hope for preventing terrorist attacks emanating from the Middle East is not “fighting them over there” – that is, ever more engagement with a terminally dysfunctional region bound to spawn new violent extremist groups as fast as they can be crushed militarily. Instead, the best hope continues to be preventing the terrorists from coming “over here” – by redoubling border security.

The Trump record on North Korea is less impressive – but not solely or even partly because even after two summits with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, no progress has been made toward eliminating the North’s nuclear weapons or even dismantling the research program that’s created them, or toward objectives such as signing a formal peace treaty to end the Korean War formally that allegedly would pave the way for a nuclear deal. (Incidentally, I’m willing to grant that the peninsula is quieter today in terms of major – meaning long-range – North Korean weapons tests than when the President took office – and that ain’t beanbag.)

Still, the main – and decisive – Trump failure entails refusing to act on his declared instincts (during his presidential campaign) and bolstering American security against nuclear attack from North Korea by withdrawing from the peninsula the tens of thousands of U.S. troops who served as a “tripwire” force. As I’ve explained previously, this globalist strategy aimed at deterring North Korean aggression in the first place by leaving an American president no choice except nuclear weapons use to save American servicemen and women from annihilation by superior North Korean forces.

But although this approach could confidently be counted on to cow the North before Pyongyang developed nuclear weapons of its own capable of striking the United States, and therefore arguably made strategic sense, now that the North has such capabilities or is frighteningly close, such “extended deterrence” is a recipe for exposing major American cities to nuclear devastation. And if that situation isn’t inexcusable enough, the United States is playing such a dominant role in South Korea’s defense largely because the South has failed to field sufficient forces of its own, even though its wealthier and more technologically advanced than the North by orders of magnitude. (Seoul’s military spending is finally rising rapidly, though – surely due at least in part to Trump pressure.) 

Nonetheless, far from taking an America First approach and letting its entirely capable Asian allies defend themselves and incentivizing them plus the Chinese and Russians to deal as they see fit with North Korean nuclear ambitions that are most threatening to these locals, the President seems to be happy to continue allowing the United States to take the diplomatic lead, bear much heavier defense spending burdens than necessary, and incurring wholly needless nuclear risk. Even worse, his strategy toward Russia and America’s European allies suffers the exact same weakness – at best.

Finally (for now), the President has bolstered national security by taken urgently needed steps to fight the Chinese trade and tech predation that has gutted so much of the American economy’s productive sectors that undergird its military power, and that his predecessors either actively encouraged, coddled, or ignored – thereby helping China greatly increase its own strength.

In this vein, it’s important to underscore that these national security concerns of mine don’t stem from a belief that China must be contained militarily in the Asia-Pacific region, or globally, as many globalists-turned-China economic hawks are maintaining. Of course, as long as the United States remains committed to at least counterbalancing China in this part of the world, it’s nothing less than insane to persist in policies that help Beijing keep building the capabilities that American soldiers, sailors, and airmen may one day need to fight.

I’ll be writing more about this shortly, but my main national security concerns reflect my belief that a world in which China has taken the military and especially technological need may not directly threaten U.S. security. But it will surely be a world in which America will become far less able to defend its interest in keeping the Western Hemisphere free of excessive foreign influence, a la the Monroe Doctrine, and in which American national finances and living standards will erode alarmingly.

The question remains, however, of whether a Bolton-less administration’s foreign policy will tilt significantly further toward America First-ism. President Trump remains mercurial enough to make any such forecasting hazardous. And even if he wasn’t, strategic transitions can be so disruptive, and create such short-term costs and even risks, that they’re bound to take place more unevenly than bloggers and think tankers and other scribblers would like to see.

But I see a case for modest optimism: Just as the end of Trump-Russia scandal-mongering and consequent impeachment threat has greatly reduced the President’s need to court the orthodox Republicans and overall conservative community that remain so influential in and with Congress in particular, and throw them some big bones on domestic policy (e.g., prioritizing cutting taxes and ending Obamacare), it’s greatly reduced his need to cater to the legacy Republicans and conservatives on foreign policy.

Not that Mr. Trump has shown many signs of shifting his domestic priorities yet. But I’m still hoping that he learns the (screamingly obvious) lessons of the Republicans’ 2018 midterms losses (e.g., don’t try to take an entitlement like Obamacare away from Americans until you’re sure you can replace it with something better; don’t endorse racist sexual predators like Alabama Republican Senatorial candidate Roy Moore simply for partisan reasons). It’s still entirely possible that the growing dangers of his remaining globalist policies will start teaching the President similar lessons on the foreign policy front.