Our So-Called Foreign Policy: New Year, New President…New Anti-Terrorism Policy?

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border security, Center for a New American Security, chattering classes, Daniel Benjamin, Daniel Henninger, foreign policy establishment, geopolitics, internationalism, ISIS, Middle East, neoconservatism, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Politico, terrorism, The Wall Street Journal, Trump

For me, one of the biggest reasons for optimism for 2017 is the election of a president ready and willing to kick over the obsolete crockery of American foreign policy and grand strategy. President-elect Trump still has to come up with his own comprehensive answers to the question, “What would come next?” His signature foreign policy speech of the campaign made that clear enough. It contained elements both of the genuine, nationalist, down-to-earth “America First” approach that I believe is urgently needed, and of the grandiose internationalist, even neoconservative blueprint that I believe must urgently be scrapped.

It’s entirely possible that this tension will complicate the new administration’s foreign policy for years to come. One reason is a simple as personnel. Because the nationalist bench is so thin, finding enough bodies to staff all the senior jobs that need to be filled will require Mr. Trump to rely on many conventional thinkers. Another has to do with the inherent difficulty of big transitions. Barring a catastrophe, they rarely happen overnight – and in many cases shouldn’t.

But because the challenge is so formidable, the overhaul effort can’t start too soon, and Americans have just received several reminders that the place to start is with fundamental geopolitics – and specifically, with my own observation that America’s immensely favorable location on the globe is an almost completely neglected diplomatic asset that Washington should try to capitalize and maximize, not seemingly intentionally squander. Put simply, those two oceans matter decisively, and coupled with the nation’s staggering treasure trove of resources and continental scale, argue compellingly for seeking progressively less, not more, global engagement. And as I’ve written, nowhere is this truer than regarding the fight against global terrorism.

In my view, little could be clearer or more promising for a geographically isolated country like the United States than the need to focus anti-ISIS etc efforts on keeping terrorists out of the country. Will a border enforcement-centric anti-terrorism policy work perfectly? Of course not. Is it a better bet for American security than pretending that even defeating ISIS will rid the dysfunctional Middle East of extremism forever, or even a few years? Or imagining that in any foreseeable future, that sad region can be turned into something other than a swamp for breeding more jihadism? That’s a total no-brainer.

But as indicated in a recent column by The Wall Street Journal‘s Daniel Henninger, America’s chattering classes have a long way to go in learning this lesson. According to Henninger, the terrorist attacks that have hit the United States lately show that “This is what it means to live as a target. What are we going to do about it? Wrap ourselves in two protective oceans?”

Moreover, a Google search quickly turned up a May report by the Center for a New American Security that reminds how deeply ingrained in the bipartisan American foreign policy establishment this belief is. According to the authors – described as “an extraordinary [and thoroughly bipartisan] group of scholars, practitioners, and journalists”:

“The best way to ensure the longevity of a rules-based international system [itself kind of a dicey notion that desperately needs rethinking] favorable to U.S. interests is not to retreat behind two oceans, lower American standards, or raise the tolerance level for risk. The proper course is to extend American power and U.S. leadership in Asia, Europe, and the Greater Middle East….”

Nonetheless, some reasons for optimism appeared last year as well. One of the most notable: An essay in Politico by Daniel Benjamin – a former Obama administration counter-terrorism official. Writing in March, Benjamin observed sagely that “While the jihadist threat is genuinely global, it is by no means equally distributed. ”

And one main reason cited by the author?

“The United States still has the blessing of geography—two oceans that mean that outside extremists will need to fly to get here. As we found on Christmas Day 2009, when Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab tried to detonate his underwear on a flight bound for Detroit, our aviation security, no-fly lists and intelligence need constant updating. But we have made major strides. By contrast, Europe, with its weak external borders, nonexistent internal borders and a migrant crisis that has brought close to a million and a half migrants into its borders, faces multiplying perils.”

And although clearly the United States has decided to “fight the terrorists over there,” Benjamin perceptively observes that it’s also made notable progress securing the border:

“One big reason why the chances of a Brussels or Paris-like attack are lower here is that we’ve been working flat out to reduce the threat for almost 15 years, since 9/11. With one of the worst extremism problems in the West, Britain has gone hard at this as well. But the same cannot be said for our Continental cousins. The United States has spent upwards of $650 billion on homeland security since 9/11. No comparable European statistic exists, but judging by law enforcement, border security and other agency budgets, the overall figures are much lower.”

I’ve been careful to argue that these two approaches aren’t mutually exclusive, and that one form of military operation in the Middle East can contribute significantly to U.S. security – at least until border controls are even stronger. That’s a campaign of anti-ISIS harassment, conducted through the air and with special forces on the ground, aimed at keeping the group off balance enough to prevent the consolidation of an Afghanistan-like base for staging September 11-scale attacks.

A somewhat larger scale anti-ISIS effort has made important progress in disrupting the group’s capabilities over the last year. But the victory will be pyrhhic if takeovers of terrorist strongholds like Mosul and Raqqa generate claims of “mission accomplished.” Benjamin is right to warn against U.S. complacency. But that’s likeliest to be prevented if the hard, unglamorous, continuing work of better securing the border moves to center stage in Washington’s anti-terrorism policy.

Im-Politic: Obama Keeps Ducking the Hard Terrorism Choices

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civil liberties, David Rieff, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, immigrants, ISIS, Islam, Jeffrey Goldberg, Middle East, Muslims, Obama, refugees, terrorism, The Atlantic, The New York Times

Give President Obama credit where it’s due. His continuing willingness to expose himself to reporters’ questions contrasts strikingly and favorably with the practice of his presumptive successor, Hillary Clinton – who has almost entirely shielded herself from freewheeling give and take with the media during this presidential campaign. Unfortunately, in the process the president also keeps showing that he’s learned absolutely nothing about protecting the United States adequately against the threat of Islamic terrorism. Just look at the transcript of his Pentagon press conference last week.

As Mr. Obama made clear, he keeps showing every sign of prioritizing the (impossible) task of achieving lasting victory versus terrorist forces on Middle East battlefields over the much more feasible strategy of keeping them out of the United States.

And the president is absolutely correct to claim that, after a string of alarming victories in Iraq and Syria, ISIS has lost considerable Middle East territory as well as some of its key leaders. He’s also correct to admit – as he has repeatedly – that the group’s “military defeat will not be enough. So long as their their twisted ideology persists and drives people to violence, then groups like ISIL will keep emerging.”

But as has also repeatedly been the case, he has failed to recognize genuinely the futility of, as he described it last week, “working to counter violent extremism more broadly, including the social, economic and political factors that help fuel groups like ISIL and Al-Qaeda in the first place.” And this after how many dollars, and how many American lives, have been lost in this region over the last two decades? In an oil-rich area that has not exactly been starved for resources in recent decades?

Even stranger, in a series of interviews with The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg that culminated in a lengthy and comprehensive description of the president’s foreign policy views, Goldberg came away concluding that Mr. Obama believes there is “little an American president could do to make [the Middle East] a better place” and that “the innate American desire to fix the sorts of problems that manifest themselves most drastically in the Middle East inevitably leads to warfare, to the deaths of U.S. soldiers, and to the eventual hemorrhaging of U.S. credibility and power.” The White House has never issued a denial. So it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the president’s views on American engagement in the region have been at best completely incoherent.

At the same time, the president’s views on keeping terrorists out of the United States, and dealing more effectively with the special problems posed by America’s Muslim community, remain much more coherent – but troublingly so. For even though U.S. borders and developments inside the nation are much more controllable than events in the Middle East, Mr. Obama’s perspective is dominated by a clear-cut fatalism. As the president once again explained in last week’s press conference, he believes he’s wrestling with a moral dilemma that puts a low-ish ceiling on his ability to protect his countrymen.

On the one hand, “[P]recisely because they are less concerned about big spectacular 9/11 style attacks, because they’ve seen the degree of attention they can get with smaller scale attacks using small arms or assault rifles or in the case of Nice, France, a truck; the possibility of either a lone actor or a small cell carrying out an attack that kills people is real and that’s why our intelligence and law enforcement and military officials are all working around the clock to try to anticipate potential attacks, to obtain the threads of people who might be vulnerable to brainwashing by ISIL.”

On the other hand, however, “We are constrained here in the United States to carry out this work in a way that is consistent with our laws, and presumptions of innocence.” Moreover, “if we start making bad decisions [like] instituting offensive religious tests on who can enter the country, you know, those kinds of strategies can end up backfiring.”

The president isn’t wrong about the need to balance domestic security with civil liberties and tolerance.  But with the significant exception of the Patriot Act and its authorization for U.S. intelligence agencies to expand their electronic data-gathering programs, he seems to view the Constitutional restraints on anti-terrorism goals as an all-but-paralyzing straitjacket.

For a compelling argument that his approach is not only overly timid, but veritably childish, take a look at this recent op-ed in The New York Times by David Rieff – a progressive. I fully agree with the author’s charge that the president refuses to admit that “In any war — including a just war — we lose a certain amount of our humanity,” and that “absent some miraculous end to terrorism, in fighting it we are going to compromise some of our values.”

This critique also applies specifically to Mr. Obama’s Muslim policies both at home and abroad. Indeed, they are greatly strengthened by the (a) president’s continued insistence – in the face of all the facts and common sense – that anyone calling for any types of curbs on Muslim immigration or refugee admissions into the country is a bigot, and (b) by his determination to respond to evidence of special security problems in the domestic Muslim community by suggesting that, if anything, its members are more patriotic and greater contributors to America’s safety proportionately than the population as a whole. As I’ve explained in a previous post, the lionization of Khizr Khan shows the extent to which this tactic has spread through the ranks of Democrats and mainstream journalists – notably by those who couldn’t even define “Gold Star Family” three weeks ago.

Presidents have no greater responsibility than national defense. If Mr. Obama took that duty to heart, he’d spend less time vilifying critics of his terrorism policies and propagating misleading anecdotes about fully assimilated American Muslims, and more time figuring out (as Rieff has so eloquently urged) how to fight the war that’s clearly underway while “controlling the worst excesses” and holding on “to enough of our humanity to have a chance of clawing back the rest when the war ends….” In particular, he’d emphatically denounce Clinton’s proposal to quintuple Middle East refugee admissions — which can only greatly worsen the domestic terrorism threat. Until he does, he’ll remain vulnerable to the accusation that his major concern isn’t protecting his fellow citizens, but ducking hard choices.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: A New Phase for Global Terrorism?

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Afghanistan, American Muslims, border security, Iraq, ISIS, Middle East, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, September 11, Syria, terrorism

Another day, another terrorist bombing – or three of them, as is the case with Saudi Arabia today. And oddly, they persist, and even multiply, at the same time that the world’s most dangerous terrorist organization, ISIS, continues to lose ground militarily in Iraq and Syria, where it had seized control over a scary amount of territory in recent years. I suspect that this seeming paradox both might become an appalling New Normal, and is telling both supporters and critics of America’s counter-terrorism strategy – including yours truly – that they need to question some of their major assumptions.

As I’ve written repeatedly, major U.S. leaders across the political spectrum have it backward in claiming that America’s top ISIS-related priority needs to be to defeat the group militarily on the battlefield. Though they often differ as to the mix of American, other free world, and local Middle Eastern forces that will be needed to accomplish this mission, they all insist that in this era of free global travel and nearly instantaneous global communication, it’s folly to believe that the United States can protect itself from ISIS and similar terrorism by tightening border control.

These voices add that neglecting ISIS’ self-styled caliphate would enable the group to consolidate a sizable, Afghanistan-type base for planning the launching big September 11-like attacks on U.S. and other targets; jeopardize other American interests in the Middle East, like ensuring access to oil; and keep ISIS’ main recruitment pitch intact – including for U.S. “lone wolves” – by reinforcing its claim to be successfully defying the infidel world and riding the wave of history.

I’ve responded that defeating ISIS would at best simply create a breathing spell until the utterly dysfunctional Middle East spawned a successor, and that however difficult it is to control visitors’ access to the United States, it’s much easier than shaping the evolution of the Middle East in more favorable, constructive ways.

At the same time, I’ve recognized that because better border security won’t happen overnight, military pressure needs to continue on the caliphate to impede its consolidation, and keep its leaders too busy defending themselves to be plotting future global strikes. My preferred instrument has been a combination of air strikes and special forces harassment. I’ve also emphasized that, because of the domestic U.S. energy production revolution, the Middle East has become much less strategically and economically important, and that Washington can now afford to focus narrowly on terrorist threats.

But the proliferation of foreign ISIS or ISIS-inspired attacks as the so-called caliphate shrinks – especially in Iraq – raises doubts about all these analyses. As I see it right now, here are the likeliest implications:

>ISIS’ prowess with internet-style recruiting is now so formidable that it can spark major terrorist threats to the United States even without a significant territorial base. So significant U.S. military involvement in the Middle East no longer matters much anymore.

>ISIS is lashing out globally precisely because it’s failing on the ground in the Middle East. (Contributor BJ Bethel made that argument on RealityChek in April.) So staying the current policy course makes the most sense.

>Territorial bases are no longer essential for fostering large-scale terrorism, but their potential to generate these attacks must still be minded. As a result, preventing their consolidation is a necessary but not sufficient response.

>Territorial control remains vital for ISIS’ power and global strike capabilities, and the United States and its allies simply haven’t undermined ISIS’ thoroughly enough.

Right now, I’m leaning toward Number Three – along with my ongoing conviction that better border security (including more monitoring of the U.S. Muslim community) will provide the most effective protection for Americans. But the latest twist in the struggle against terrorism should be reminding everyone that these forces remain impressively agile and adaptive. Consequently, both supporters and opponents of U.S. strategy need to display these characteristics, too.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Fearless Foolishness on Terrorism

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2016 election, chattering classes, Donald Trump, Immigration, ISIS, Michael Tomasky, Muslims, Orlando, Orlando attacks, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Paris attacks, refugees, September 11, terrorism, The New York Times

Ever since the September 11 attacks, I’ve worried that a sizable share of the American public, and especially its chattering and media classes, has lost the instinct for self-preservation. Michael Tomasky’s column in the June 18 New York Times epitomizes this trend – and the extra oomph it’s acquired over the few months, thanks in part (but only in part) to presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump’s free-swinging presidential campaign.

Tomasky, editor of the “journal of ideas” Democracy, got off on a wildly wrong foot with his description of the politics of terrorism since September 11. In his view, it’s a story of successful “fear-mongering” that began with former President George W. Bush’s “talk of weapons of mass destruction and mushroom clouds” and launch of the second Iraq War, but that might be coming to an end with what he views as strong public push-back against Trump’s statements following the Orlando shooting.

No one should support fear-mongering. But has the post-September 11 American political and policy scene really an example of Republicans “whipping the electorate into a state of frenzy about this or that threat”? Here Tomasky’s resort to social-science-y jargon becomes even more exquisitely revealing than that jaw-dropping belittling of an event that killed nearly 3,000 people (from 93 countries) and injured thousands more.

As the author explains it, fifteen years ago, unscrupulous right wing demagogues exploited fear’s ability to lead voters to “embrace more conservative positions than they might otherwise have.” Even worse, in Tomasky’s view, they took advantage of the tendency of “people who start imagining their own death [to] begin to sanction extreme measures to prevent it from happening.”

Apparently, it’s unacceptable to Tomasky and to those Americans who consider their country’s reactions to terrorist violence to be excessive, that outbursts of mass murder spur widespread demands that U.S. leaders go beyond business-as-usual to save their compatriots’ lives and their own.

If you believe Tomasky et al don’t deserve this accusation, then tell me how you would explain his contention that the most sensible reaction to September, 11 nowadays – and one he’s pleased to report is spreading – is a shoulder-shrugging recognition that “we have joined the world, the weary and beleaguered world, and learned that anything can happen anywhere, anytime”?

This stunningly blasé attitude clearly also lies behind Tomasky’s condemnation of Trump’s statement, following last November’s Paris attacks – and a mere two week before the San Bernardino, California murders – that “We’re going to have to do things that we never did before. And some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule.” And even though 49 more innocent Americans were killed by an ISIS follower in Orlando, Tomasky is still preaching (literal) fatalism.

Indeed, here, evidently is his greatest terrorism-related worry right now: that “a different kind of terrorist attack this fall — one actually orchestrated by the Islamic State, say, or spreading death more randomly — may produce a more traditional fallout than Orlando.” Translation: Americans may become even more insistent that their leaders figure out how to keep them safe. Thankfully, this school of thought wasn’t prevalent in Massachusetts in 1775 – unless Paul Revere was a fear-mongerer, too?

Tomasky’s article is not completely off the wall. He rightly notes that “You can’t stoke fear if you can’t also reassure. It won’t work. If you want to make people scared and force them to turn to you as their protector, you have to demonstrate that you are worthy of being that protector.” He just as rightly observes that Trump hasn’t passed that test of leadership beyond his base.

The author also makes the entirely legitimate point that some of the post-September 11 Bush policies – chiefly the second Iraq War – have backfired in major ways. (He would have placed himself on stronger ground, however, by acknowledging that under Bush, nothing remotely approaching a September 11 repeat took place, and that throughout his term, the 43d president urged Americans not to turn either on their fellow Muslim citizens or on Islam in general.)

But it’s impossible to read Tomasky’s piece objectively, add in its complete lack of alternative policy proposals, and not conclude that his top priority is to help foster the emergence of a “political golden age when inducing fear will never work.” (Yes, that phrase is a verbatim quote.) You needn’t be a Trump-ite, or support blanket Muslim immigration and refugee bans or other unworkable ideas, to recognize that in a still-dangerous world, a dose of fear is essential for survival itself – and that 63 Americans killed by Islamist-inspired attackers in the last six months alone is an unmistakable sign that current U.S. terrorism strategy urgently needs some more of it.

Following Up: Obama Still Deflecting Radical Islam Challenge – & Endangering America

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civil liberties, Following Up, Immigration, ISIS, Islam, Obama, Omar Mateen, Orlando, Orlando attacks, Paris attacks, profiling, radical Islam, refugees, terrorism

In yesterday’s post on the Orlando terror attack, I criticized President Obama for ignoring the Islamic extremism angle even after it was confirmed by a senior FBI official. Earlier today, he made some follow-up remarks addressing the issue. Unfortunately, although Mr. Obama took some modest steps toward linking yesterday’s shootings and similar outrages to a strand of intolerance in Islam that is anything but fringe, his gingerly treatment of the subject still indicates a strong reluctance to recognize the problem. Therefore, it’s hard to imagine him starting to support the full mix of measures likeliest to keep Americans safe.

Speaking to reporters today, the president acknowledged that “It does appear that at the last minute, [murderer Omar Mateen] announced allegiance to ISIL….” So he’s now on record as placing the atrocity in categories other than “hate crime” and “gun violence/mass shooting.” Mr. Obama also noted that ISIS and similar groups – which he has long accused of “perverting Islam” – have targeted “gays and lesbians because they believe that they do not abide by their attitudes towards sexuality.”

In addition, the president denounced – rightly in my view – those voices who seem determined to treat the policy choices facing the nation as “either/or” and who suggest that “either we think about something as terrorism and we ignore the problems with easy access to firearms or it’s all about firearms and we ignore the role, the very real role, that organizations like ISIL have in generating extremist views inside this country.”

The key question, however, is whether Mr. Obama’s analysis can justify the fundamentally new preventive measures toward which the Islamist connection unmistakably points – like more restrictive immigration policies that target (or “profile,” if you will) newcomers and visitors from heavily Muslim countries, a pause in admissions of refugees from the war-torn Middle East, and markedly greater surveillance of America’s domestic Muslim community.

The string of qualifiers that accompanied this statement signals that none of these changes is on his mind. Mr. Obama said that Mateen’s allegiance to ISIS “appeared” to have reflected a “last minute” decision. He also stated that “at this stage, we see no clear evidence that he was directed externally” and that “also, at this stage, there’s no direct evidence that he was part of a larger plot.” All these comments unavoidably – and no doubt deliberately – suggested that the link between Mateen and Islamism was the flimsiest, shallowest sort possible, and thus virtually irrelevant to his actions.

Moreover, despite the president’s realistic description of ISIS’ propaganda and recruiting capabilities inside the United States, he seems unwilling to take the next step and conclude that the terrorists’ main targets – and likeliest converts – aren’t just randomly sprinkled throughout the American population.

Mr. Obama characterized these targets as “troubled individuals or weak individuals” – which obviously is true. But ISIS and similar groups have a much more specific focus, and their successes are equally particular. They’re individuals who either are Muslim by background, who are engaged in or actively contemplating conversion, or who identify with the faith, or with certain of its precepts. Which means that America’s counter-terror approaches need to concentrate on this community. And the reality of limited resources makes some form of strategic prioritization all the more essential.

Revealingly, as I’ve previously pointed out, President Obama has admitted that extremist ideologies have resonated to a disturbing degree within mainstream Islam, and that the world’s mainstream Muslims – including presumably those in the United States – have not responded adequately. These views, expressed at a press conference in Turkey shortly after the November, 2015 Paris attacks, deserve to be presented at length:

“…I do think that Muslims around the world — religious leaders, political leaders, ordinary people — have to ask very serious questions about how did these extremist ideologies take root, even if it’s only affecting a very small fraction of the population. It is real and it is dangerous. And it has built up over time, and with social media it has now accelerated.

“And so I think, on the one hand, non-Muslims cannot stereotype, but I also think the Muslim community has to think about how we make sure that children are not being infected with this twisted notion that somehow they can kill innocent people and that that is justified by religion. And to some degree, that is something that has to come from within the Muslim community itself. And I think there have been times where there has not been enough pushback against extremism. There’s been pushback — there are some who say, well, we don’t believe in violence, but are not as willing to challenge some of the extremist thoughts or rationales for why Muslims feel oppressed. And I think those ideas have to be challenged.”

The president is correct in warning of stereotyping’s dangers. But the Orlando shooting reminds devastatingly that his record on balancing the protection of domestic Muslims’ essential liberties and the protection of all Americans’ security – by fostering such anti-extremist pushback from that community, stepping up monitoring, and strengthening immigration controls – has fallen way short.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Why the Middle East Refugee Debate Has Just Been Settled

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Brussels attacks, Europe, Germany, ISIS, Middle East, migrants, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Paris attacks, refugees, Syria, terrorism, vetting, Washington Post

Here’s hoping that President Obama has found time on his current overseas trip to read the Washington Post carefully. Because if he does, he would realize that opponents of admitting more Middle East refugees into the United States have been utterly and completely correct, and that from now on, the only remaining supporters are either willful know-nothings and guilt-drenched-to-the-point-of-being-suicidal bleeding hearts – along with politicians determined to pander to them.

What’s ended any serious debate over the refugee issue are the results of a Post investigation published yesterday. It offers overwhelming evidence that significant numbers of terrorists have indeed hidden in the tides of migrants streaming from war-torn Syria, Iraq, and the like into Europe, and that in the last few months alone they’ve helped carry out the horrific attacks in Paris and Brussels.

The Post article, by Anthony Faiola and Souad Mekhennet, doesn’t mean that Republican Presidential front-runner Donald Trump’s Muslim ban or similar religious litmus test proposals are good or practical ideas. It also makes clear that Europe’s efforts to vet the migrants were marked by the kind of incompetence not yet displayed by American national and homeland security authorities, and that the Europeans were also simply overwhelmed by numbers that not even the most utopian U.S. politicians have been talking about.

But no fair-minded reader can possibly end the piece confident that Americans can be adequately protected against enemies that have seized thousands of passports from embattled Middle East countries, that use the latest technology to doctor them – and that recruit from failed states like Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen that lack any serious record-keeping capacity.

The key finding in the article: “[O]ver the past six months, more than three dozen suspected militants who impersonated migrants have been arrested or died while planning or carrying out acts of terror. They include at least seven directly tied to the bloody attacks in Paris and Brussels. “

In addition, the authors claim to have interviewed an ISIS commander, who told them that “We have sent many operatives to Europe with the refugees. Some of our brothers have fulfilled their mission, but others are still waiting to be activated.”

The Post article isn’t the first to detail the exploitation of the refugee crisis by terrorist groups. In February, Germany’s domestic intelligence chief stated that European governments have “seen repeatedly that terrorists are being smuggled in, camouflaged as refugees. That is a fact that security authorities must always seek to recognize and identify.”

Yet the president is clinging to his goal of admitting 10,000 Syrian refugees by October 1 – even though only some 1,200 have been settled so far.Mr. Obama hasn’t backed away from his claim that opponents of his policies are fear-mongering (not to mention “scared of widows and orphans”). Indeed, if not for the pushback, it’s likely that he’d press for letting in even more migrants.

Supporters of greater refugee quotas – including the president – are right to note that the United States faces a variety of terrorism threats, including those from home-grown radicals of all faiths who arguably are at least as dangerous. They’re also right to note that, whether you favor religious litmus tests for admissions or not, they’re all too easy to fool or evade.

But as the Post article documents, the admissions backers are profoundly wrong — and reckless — to use these arguments as excuses to maintain or increase American admissions. For if U.S. leaders are already hard-pressed to protect the public from existing dangers, multiplying these threats in any way is simply unconscionable.

Guest Post: Cable News is Badly Missing the Big ISIS Picture, by B.J. Bethel

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Brussels attacks, cable news, Fareed Zakaria, Guest Post, Iraq, IS, ISIS, media, Middle East, Paris attacks, pundits, San Bernardino, Syria, terrorism, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Thomas Friedman

Although campaign junkies wouldn’t know it, one of the biggest news developments of the day is being badly mis-reported by the cable news networks they followed obsessively: The Islamic State in the Levant (ISIL – also commonly known as ISIS or just IS) is losing in the Levant – namely, in Syria and in Iraq.

With presidential candidates wanting to forgo the Geneva Convention, carpet bomb civilians and generally try to out-tough each other in debate after debate, you’d think IS is conquering the world like Alexander the Great, or running a blitzkrieg through central Europe. But producers and executives trying to capture eight-second attention spans seem incapable of getting the story right. In fact, the only reliable American reporting on IS’ remarkably fast fade is coming from major U.S. newspapers.

Just a year and a half ago, IS was indeed frighteningly on the rise. It controlled an area the size of Great Britain, reaching from Syria into Iraq to Tikrit. The group captured the second-largest city in Iraq – Mosul – after the Iraqi military refused to fight. It created a new arena for terror on social media, posting videos of brutal executions. Mass executions of Christians in Libya, captured on video, quickly followed, and shocked those who failed to realize the reach of the group or its brutality.

Adding to the sense of alarm: evidence that IS was rewriting the terrorism rule book Western officials thought they’d figured out. Indeed, last year The New York Review of Books published a history of IS by “Anonymous” – identified as a high-ranking official in a Western government. The main theme: The group defied convention. Nearly every move it made was wrong according to the existing framework of success for terror groups and the West had no explanation for its existence, let alone its success and how to stop it.

Circumstances are different now. The Islamic State has lost most of its major territory in Iraq. An Iraqi military division – trained by the U.S – ran IS out of the city of Tikrit in a day and a half. Its last major stronghold outside of rural territory is Mosul, but local news service Rudaw has reported that Sunni militia, the Kurdish and Iraqi presidents, and U.S. envoy Brett McGurk are planning to retake Mosul, in what is expected to be one of the bloodiest battles in the region’s history of the region. Already, the U.S. military has been operating within 75 miles of Mosul. It seems the bully has finally taken a punch to the face.

Yet when the IS issue is discussed on television – whether by pundits, politicians or candidates – it’s within the framework of two years ago, when the group was flooding Iraq. This alarmism seems to be justified by the group’s dramatically stepped up attacks outside the Middle East – in Paris, Brussels, and San Bernardino, California. But paradoxically, IS’ strikes outside its home region reflect its worsening predicament in Iraq and Syria, not its strength, and cable’s failure to present this context shows the costs of coverage lacking context or even analysis with minimal depth.

The contrast with the major dailies is especially revealing. Take The Wall Street Journal’s coverage of the battle in the Levant. When the Free Syrian Army took Palmyra last week, the Journal had the story a day or two later. The New York Times, and Fareed Zakaria’s Sunday morning GPS CNN show are also feature reporting with detail and solid judgment.

Why has national TV news been portraying the Islamic State with all the sloppiness of local TV news discussing the latest school board meeting? In all likelihood, because reporting complexity would make the standard four-panelist, five-minute pundit segments much difficult for audiences to follow. How could you keep typical viewers from flipping the dial after years of feeding them little but the latest cheap shot or salvo aimed at a rival political operative?

Debates could suffer, too. Since the audiences generally haven’t been informed about the current facts on the ground, on-target questions would be confusing. And the candidates themselves, as well as ratings-starved networks, would lose valuable opportunities to make those showy, attention-grabbing, tough-sounding “crank up the Enola Gay” quotes that end up on Vines and Facebook.

What exactly should the cable networks in particularly be covering? In particular, they need to do a much better job understanding and explaining IS’ attraction to its fighters and supporters.

During the group’s heyday a year ago, IS was indeed recruiting in droves. Now it’s failing to find new followers as it takes major losses and discovers fighting is a bit tougher when you aren’t rolling into cities unimpeded.

Thomas Friedman of The New York Times put it best – if you are a 20-year-old man in Syria or Iraq, don’t have a wife or job; IS can provide those. But circumstances have changed. IS is facing actual opposition, meaning there’s a good chance of dying from a bullet wound or a gravity bomb. IS, moreover, was paying its fighters with oil revenues, but these started drying up substantially right after its rigs were bombed by allied airstrikes.

In addition, one major reason for IS’ success despite its brutality and other convention-defying tactics has been its religious message. That is, IS is as much an apocalyptic cult as much as a radical Islamist terror group. It cites a belief that a confrontation with the West in Syria would bring about the end of the world. This is why the group uses social media as a means to keep itself in the news and to try to drive the U.S. into a conflict in Iraq: a final round with the West on Islam’s home soil would lend credibility to its vision of the end times and ostensibly supercharge recruiting.

But today, the group is engaged in heavy combat, its organization and rank and file both taking heavy losses. But the Western military role in Middle East combat has been relatively light – especially on the ground. So those end-of-the-world predictions are looking ever dicier.

In addition, IS has been losing much of the ground it had gained in Syria as well as in Iraq. The Kurds pushed IS across the Euphrates three weeks ago, forcing them into their home territory of Aleppo. Six months ago this accomplishment would have been unimaginable. Last week the Free Syrian Army defeated IS in Palmyra, the ancient Roman/Greco city.

Indeed, this brings us to another reason why IS’ recent loss of traction isn’t being covered: the unholy alliance arrayed against it. Hezbollah, Syrian dictator Bashir Al-Assad (who was Public Enemy No. 1 three years ago ahead of IS and all other radicals before him), the Free Syrian Army, the Russians, the Turks, the Kurds, (maybe some Al Qaeda elements), the Iranians – all these forces have had a part in pushing IS back and handing it defeat after defeat even as U.S.-aided Iraqi forces are beating the group in Iraq. How does one tell that tale in a 30-second news byte?

But complexity can never excuse shoddy reporting – in particular when it’s obscuring the most important IS-related development of all: IS isn’t attacking Brussels and Paris for its enjoyment but for survival, trying to move the battlefront, trying to take the focus from the Levant. Expect IS also to become more active in Libya, where it has created a new franchise, for lack of a better word. This isn’t the darkening shadow of conquest we’re seeing, however, but the desperate lashing out of a cornered animal.  

B.J. Bethel is an Ohio-based journalist who has covered politics, government, the environment, and sports for over a decade.

 

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Trump’s Making Sense About NATO & Europe, Too

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2016 election, allies, Brussels attacks, Cold War, defense budget, Donald Trump, Earl C. Ravenal, Europe, intelligence, ISIS, Middle East, military spending, NATO, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, terrorism

Front-running Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has done it again: He’s scandalized the American political and foreign policy (and therefore media) establishments with his charge this week that the United States is spending too much on defending Europe via its membership in the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) alliance. And once again, he’s hit the nail much closer to the head than the nation’s political leaders and self-appointed national security experts.

Most of the responses to Trump make one or both of two main points: First, that the NATO commitment isn’t very expensive at all; and second, the aftermath of yet another major terrorist attack in Europe is the last time when anyone should be questioning this most important of U.S. ties to the Continent – including for America’s own sake.

Yet the first allegation is nonsense. In large measure it’s based on the costs of maintaining NATO as an organization. This sum is indeed miniscule compared with the overall U.S. military budget or the size of the whole American economy. But it also has virtually nothing to do with the real costs of fielding and deploying the military forces – both nuclear and conventional – that do the actual defending even in peacetime.

Surprisingly, this figure isn’t easy to identify. Why not? Because the Defense Department doesn’t break out most of  its budget by expenditures for major regions of the world. The one major exception: its funding requests for what it calls Overseas Contingency Operations – money used to pay for ongoing missions like Middle East wars (including attacks on ISIS), counter-terrorism campaigns, and the like.

Significantly, one Europe-related category is now listed. It’s called the European Reassurance Initiative, and as the Pentagon openly states, its components – notably increasing the American military presence in Europe – are mainly directed at newly assertive Russia. Last year, this program alone cost more than the U.S. contribution to the NATO budget – $789 million versus $514 million. And the Defense Department wants to quadruple the amount for next year.

At the same time, these totals don’t begin to take into account the full costs of the American military commitment to Europe. A rough idea of how great they could be can be gleaned from one of the few systematic efforts to analyze the geography of the defense budget – by the brilliant and iconoclastic former Pentagon official Earl C. Ravenal. Ravenal’s work unfortunately dates from the Cold War era, but it does provide a sense of the yawning gap between those NATO organization budget figures and truly comprehensive numbers.

According to Ravenal, the NATO commitment accounted fully half ($129 billion) of the 1983 $258 billion proposed Pentagon budget. Critics responded that even without NATO/Europe responsibilities, the nation would still need to maintain many of the forces both stationed on the Continent and assigned to it under various contingencies. But they never explained why. So Ravenal’s statistics look pretty reasonable to me.

The current (fiscal year 2016) Pentagon budget request is $585.2 billion; therefore, using the Ravenal methodology, we’d get just over $300 billion devoted to Europe’s defense. But this figure would also be highly misleading. After all, U.S. priorities have changed dramatically. During the Cold War days, the United States regularly maintained more than 300,000 troops in Europe, along with their families. Today, European deployments are down to about 50,000. Moreover, the United States keeps many fewer nuclear weapons in Europe as well (although these arms have always been relatively cheap.) Today, the region commanding the greatest American military resources is the Middle East. (And to add to the complications, many of the forces and other assets in Europe support Middle East deployments and combat, too).

Nonetheless, even taking these historical changes into account, it must be clear that the American commitment to Europe is costing at least tens of billions of dollars annually, and possibly more. Given these totals, given their likely increase, and given the risks (including nuclear) still run by the United States to help defend the Europeans, it sounds perfectly reasonable to ask whether Americans are getting adequate bang for this national security buck – especially considering how wealthy Europe is today, and how meager its own military spending.

But doesn’t the United States need European cooperation to help fight ISIS and other terrorist threats? Unquestionably, the more assistance the United States can get, the safer it will be. And since Europe seems to be such an important target for ISIS in particular, the ability to access European intelligence about the Islamic States would appear to be invaluable.

Three questions, however, need to be answered by the Establishmentarians. First, why would that intelligence access need to depend on keeping today’s NATO ties fully intact? Why couldn’t Washington and the Europeans be able to keep working together on the terrorism front without Americans underwriting Europe’s nuclear and conventional defense against other threats? Would the allies, for example, withhold this information if the United States drew down its military presence further? Fits of pique of course can never be ruled out. But wouldn’t the Europeans then risk losing their access to U.S. intelligence and other forms of assistance?

Second, just how good is European intelligence? According to this new examination of Belgium’s anti-terrorism efforts, little confidence is justified. In fact, overall European counter-terrorism activity is unimpressive at best. On the one hand, these countries will surely get up to speed in the wake of recent attacks. On the other hand, it’s nothing less than amazing that they’ve dawdled so long considering how much closer they are located to the Middle East than America is. So maybe once the initial outrage at the Brussels attacks fades, Europe will go back to business as usual, with all that implies about how helpful to the United States its countries can actually be.

Third, will the Europeans ever get their military act together?  Of course, these countries are potentially valuable as military allies in the air and ground fighting against ISIS in the Middle East. But there can be no question that the performance has lagged badly. And even though some signs of increased European military spending are finally appearing, they won’t turn into significantly greater capabilities for many years.

Some believe that Trump’s remarks simply represent an attempted bluff, and that his real aim is to convince the allies to bolster their capabilities. If so, the dynamics of free-riding are likely to doom this ploy as they have so often in the past. But if Trump is signaling a belief that U.S.-European security relations need major changes, and that a rigorous, unsentimental look at costs and benefits, risks and rewards could well justify much less U.S. involvement in the Continent’s defense, the result might easily be a much safer America, and a mainstay of foreign policy conventional wisdom that he’s made look just as foolish as the political conventional wisdom.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Holes in Obama’s Middle East “Doctrine”

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Al Qaeda, border security, Democratic Party, foreign policy establishment, Iran, ISIS, Jeffrey Goldberg, Middle East, missile defense, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, September 11, terrorism, The Atlantic

If you have any interest in American foreign policy, international affairs, President Obama’s overarching strategy, or simply how he makes decisions generally, The Atlantic‘s current cover story based on a series of lengthy interviews with the chief executive is an absolute must-read. Kudos, incidentally, to author Jeffrey Goldberg for his skill at inducing Mr. Obama to open up so completely.

In fact, the only legitimate criticism – and clearly this wasn’t under Goldberg’s control – involves how late in the president’s term most of these thoughts came out. The public would have had a much better basis for judging Mr. Obama’s record and talent as a commander-in-chief and diplomat – and a much better chance of influencing his moves – had this window into his mindset appeared much earlier.

Any number of RealityChek posts can – and I hope will – come out of this material, but to me what deserves spotlighting right away is the completely incoherent approach the president has taken to the Middle East. Specifically, it could not be more obvious that he has concluded that the region is as utterly hopeless as I have contended repeatedly. Yet he still refuses to overhaul American policy, much less American objectives, in ways that logically follow. The result is what Goldberg calls an “Obama Doctrine” that still leaves gaping Middle East-related holes in America’s security.

Not that the president has always dismissed the notion that, within the foreseable future, the Middle East can even be minimally pacified or stabilized, much less modernized or democratized. As the author shows, “The story of Obama’s encounter with the Middle East follows an arc of disenchantment. In his first extended spree of fame, as a presidential candidate in 2008, Obama often spoke with hope about the region. In Berlin that summer, in a speech to 200,000 adoring Germans, he said, ‘This is the moment we must help answer the call for a new dawn in the Middle East.’”

Two years in office didn’t change Mr. Obama’s outlook appreciably: “Through the first flush of the Arab Spring, in 2011, Obama continued to speak optimistically about the Middle East’s future, coming as close as he ever would to embracing the so-called freedom agenda of George W. Bush, which was characterized in part by the belief that democratic values could be implanted in the Middle East. He equated protesters in Tunisia and Tahrir Square with Rosa Parks and the ‘patriots of Boston.’”

According to Goldberg, what soured Mr. Obama on the region was a combination of growing pique with most of its leaders and then the failure of his Libyan intervention. That debacle “proved to him that the Middle East was best avoided. ‘There is no way we should commit to governing the Middle East and North Africa,’ he recently told a former colleague from the Senate. ‘That would be a basic, fundamental mistake.’” Added Goldberg, the president now believes that “thanks to America’s energy revolution [the Middle East] will soon be of negligible relevance to the U.S. economy.”

Goldberg’s explanation is something of a paradox: “The rise of the Islamic State deepened Obama’s conviction that the Middle East could not be fixed—not on his watch, and not for a generation to come.” Yet in the president’s own words, ISIS “has the capacity to set the whole region on fire. That’s why we have to fight it.”

In fact, these passages reveal one big internal contradiction of the Obama approach. On the one hand, he’s happy to talk endlessly in public about his genuine belief that the Middle East is little more than one big potential Vietnam-like quagmire for America. Indeed, he told Goldberg that the region’s tribalism is “a force no president can neutralize” and is a major source of his fatalism. On the other hand, Mr. Obama insists, as above, that the United States has no choice but to try preventing conflagration.

As a result, here’s the clearest way that the president can describe how he determines when and how to act: “We have to determine the best tools to roll back those kinds of attitudes. There are going to be times where either because it’s not a direct threat to us or because we just don’t have the tools in our toolkit to have a huge impact that, tragically, we have to refrain from jumping in with both feet.” But when Middle East threats are “direct” but the “toolkit” is wanting, the United States should just…what exactly? No wonder so few Americans have confidence in the president’s national security chops.

The more fundamental flaw with the Obama doctrine, however, is its evident assumption that when “direct threats” to American security emerge in the Middle East, or show signs of stirring, extensive intervention in the region’s madhouse politics – whether with meaningful allied assistance or not – is America’s only option.

That’s certainly been the American Way for decades. But as I’ve pointed out, because of the nation’s favorable geography, two vastly superior alternatives have been available since the September 11 attacks so dramatically revealed that simple benign neglect of the region had become unacceptable. The first alternative measure is to establish genuine border security, to ensure that terrorists face much greater obstacles entering the United States and remaining in the country (the visa overstay problem). The second is to build the kind of missile defense that could protect America from the kind of small-scale nuclear strike that Iran could launch in the policy-relevant future if the worst fears about its military ambitions and the president’s de-nuclearization deal come to pass. (Such a system would help counter North Korean nuclear threats.)

Of course, because these programs will take years to complete, a bridging strategy is needed. That should focus on using special forces units and airstrikes to keep ISIS and Al Qaeda (which hasn’t disappeared) sufficiently off balance to prevent consolidation of a terrorist state that could be used as a training center and launchpad for September 11-like operations. Accordingly, talk of finally defeating ISIS et al should be eliminated – because even if the goal is achieved, successor groups will surely arise.

A final point worth making: One of the most important services performed by Goldberg is documenting beyond any reasonable doubt that most of the current Democratic Party foreign policy establishment – including presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton, Mr. Obama’s former Secretary of State – is much less ambivalent about interventionism than he is. And generally speaking, these attitudes are even more pronounced in Republican ranks. That’s why it’s hard to look at the politics of 2016 and feel much confidence that the United States will have the wit and wisdom to extricate itself safely from the looney-bin Middle East any time soon.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Send in the Clowns

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2016 election, alliances, Bernie Sanders, China, Cold War, Donald Trump, economics, foreign policy establishment, free-riding, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Iraq war, ISIS, Middle East, NATO, neoconservatives, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Republicans, Russia, special interests, think tanks, Trade

You don’t need to have any regard for Donald Trump to appreciate the black humor of Washington’s Republican foreign policy establishment (or at least lots of it) launching a campaign to brand him an incompetent and a menace in international affairs.

Last Wednesday, about 100 “GOP national security leaders” released a letter they signed stating their “core objections” to the possibility that the Republican front-runner will win the White House. The first reaction that any reasonable person should have is “If these are the leaders, who are the followers?” I worked professionally in the foreign policy field for decades and still keep up with it actively. And many of the signatories are completely unknown even to me. Apparently even a glorified briefcase carrier for a fourth-level political appointee in George W. Bush’s administration qualifies.

The second reaction is much more obvious: Many come from the Republican party’s neoconservative wing. Based on its record, their credibility has fallen how deeply into the toilet? Nor is this question based solely on the second Iraq war. After all, I personally favored the effort to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and still believe that the invasion was justified – though of course the occupation was a (largely foreseeable disaster). But these ostensible experts and intellectuals have failed on numerous other major grounds as well.

As made clear by their indictment of Trump, their ranks include champions of the laudable but transparently looney idea that the United States can and should spend considerable amounts of time and effort spreading democracy to and engaging in nation-building in regions and countries (like Iraq) that have no tradition of accountable government and no experience with un-coerced cohesion. More recently, they’ve propounded the equally nutty notion that Middle Eastern countries can be turned into an effective anti-ISIS force that will handle most of the ground fighting to boot.

They’ve long supported U.S. trade and international economic policies whose effects have included enriching increasingly belligerent China and showering it with advanced, defense-related technologies. For nearly as long they’ve favored the expansion of the NATO alliance right up to Russia proper’s borders – which can’t have helped improve relations between Washington and Moscow over the last decade. In fact, even decades after the Cold War ended, they have remained tightly wed to U.S. defense commitments to flagrantly free-riding allies – which also often rip off Americans shamelessly on trade and other fronts. In fact, they have never displayed the slightest genuine inkling that domestic economic strength is the key to any successful American foreign policy strategy, however interventionist or restrained.

But there are two more fundamental problems with these figures, along with the non-neocons among them, that have translated directly into weaknesses and blunders that have plagued American diplomacy since the early post-World War II years. And please keep in mind: Many of these conclusions come straight from my first-hand experience working closely with these folks during my four-year stint as Associate Editor of FOREIGN POLICY magazine.

First, unlike the original Cold War U.S. foreign policymakers – who were certainly not beyond legitimate criticism – most of the current crowd lacks any meaningful experience in the private sector. Its members have never built or even run viable businesses, or invented anything worthwhile. As a result, they have never been judged by standards like successes that create tangible, enduring rewards and widespread benefits, or failures that exact painful, lasting costs.

Instead, most have brought themselves to the attention of decision-makers by rising through the ranks of academe or, worse, its ersatz Washington version – the think tank world. And the skills needed to stand out in these realms – turning a neat phrase or fashioning a catchy soundbite, identifying and courting prospective patrons, manipulating an all-too-gullible national media, and perhaps most important, creatively regurgitating stale dogma that promotes special interests – have nothing to do with keeping the nation as a whole secure and prosperous. They’re entirely about personal advancement in what I’ve called a Washington culture that coddles failure.

In other words, these figures are overwhelmingly foreign policy careerists. And since their working experiences as a rule have been so tightly confined to the bubble worlds of the Beltway or college campuses, they have almost never needed to encounter the obstacles continually erected by stubborn reality to the best laid plans of mice and men. Which is why they typically lack the wisdom and judgment best guaranteed to navigate them.

Not surprisingly, then, these 20^th and 21^st century version of renaissance courtiers deserve credit for no meaningful achievements whatever. Indeed, the degree of safety and prosperity that the nation has enjoyed during their tenures has been due almost entirely to the wealth and power it has amassed over the centuries, along with the inherent security created by favorable geography. If today’s foreign policy establishment can be said to have accomplished anything, it’s taking practically any opportunity available to squander the nation’s built-in advantages.

Not that I want to leave readers with the impression that out-of-control careerism is confined to the Republican wing of the foreign policy establishment. Its Democratic wing has been at least as unimpressive. And you can be sure you’ll be hearing from it if Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders starts posing a greater threat to Hillary Clinton’s presidential hopes.