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.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: More Establishment Happy Talk About De-Industrialization

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Anne-Marie Slaughter, blue collar, Bureau of Labor Statistics, design, engineering, Madeleine Albright, manufacturing, New America, offshoring, research and development, STEM, Trade, white collar, {What's Left of) Our Economy

I’m all for looking on the sunny side of life. Making up the sunny side of life? Not so much. That’s why I find Anne-Marie Slaughter’s recent Financial Times column so disturbing. For the author – a contributing editor of the FT, the president of New America (a tech and offshoring industry-funded think tank in Washington, D.C.), and a former leading foreign policy adviser to President Obama) has just served up an exercise in economic hopium that is almost entirely fact-free, and that repeats a canard that was hopelessly out of date twenty years ago.

Slaughter’s fanciful claim? That the spread of the internet of things throughout American manufacturing is going to spur a revival of America’s hard-hit, industry-heavy midwestern Rust Belt. One main reason, according to the author:

“[T]he next phase of the digital revolution is the internet of things. The Midwest is the traditional home of makers — of cars, tractors, machines and household appliances. Companies such as Deere & Co, Carrier or Ford may have shifted manufacturing abroad, but the design, engineering and innovation is still concentrated back home. Those jobs may be less sexy than billion-dollar start-ups, but they will be stable and well paid. On Thanksgivings to come, Midwest cities seeking to grow their tech sectors should have more and more to be thankful for.”

Although the headline (which Slaughter probably isn’t responsible for) – “The internet of things helps spark a rust belt revival” – signals that the Midwestern renaissance is already well underway, the author herself is honest enough to specify in the text that the only metrics she presents show progress on this score limited to “a fraction of a percentage point.” But it would have been more honest to at least hint at all the data suggesting how pie-in-the-sky her prediction is over any foreseeable time frame.

For example, although there’s no authoritative source of information showing how many employees of manufacturing companies based in the United States (either U.S.- or foreign-owned) work in science and technology positions, numbers are available for the share of American manufacturing workers occupying both blue-collar and white-collar jobs. These aren’t definitive, because many of the white-collar jobs are administrative and management jobs having little or nothing to do with innovation, and because manufacturing companies have tried to eliminate as many as possible to maximize cost savings.

But it’s still surely revealing that, since the offshoring phase of U.S. trade policy officially began when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect at the beginning of 1994, American manufacturing employment falling outside the “nonsupervisory and production” category is down by 956,000 – or 20.45 percent. That’s a smaller hit than taken by industry’s blue-collar workforce – which is down by 39 percent, or 3.418 million. But over the last two-plus decades, the blue-collar/white-collar job split in manufacturing has barely budged, with the former’s share down from only 72.27 percent to 70.21 percent. Does that tell you a dramatic U-Turn is anywhere on the horizon?

Moreover, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (the source of the above figures) did take a cursory look at the employment of some types of engineers in various sectors within domestic manufacturing. It found that, in May, 2015, between about 38 percent and about 55 percent of the workforces in American information technology hardware production belonged in science and technology categories. But little of this type of manufacturing is located in the rust belt.

The only data set this same study contained that looked relevant to the midwest covered the increase in the number of mechanical engineers employed in the motor vehicle parts and various industrial machinery sectors. Only in motor vehicle parts did the workforces (modestly) exceed 10,000 – and this in an industry whose payrolls approached 564,000 that month, and whose total white-collar workforce came to just over 128,000.

Although it’s true that the statistics could be missing the kind of shift Slaughter expects (and her headline writer regards as already underway), anyone familiar with the way manufacturing typically works would understand why extreme skepticism is in order. In real-life manufacturing companies, and especially factories (as opposed to those imagined by so many think tankers and academics), production on the one hand and research and development etc on the other are rarely activities that are so sharply distinctive that one can readily take place around the world from another. In fact, they are so closely related that knowledge tends to flow back and forth between production line and lab in a continuous, interactive feedback loop. And it’s not remotely good enough to exchange this information electronically. That’s why, in sector after sector of manufacturing, when the production leaves the country, the research and development and design and engineering tend to follow.

And that’s why the only useful purpose served by Slaughter’s article – and the FT‘s decision to publish it – is reminding readers that, as long as American trade and other globalization policies keep needlessly fostering the export of manufacturing, offshoring interests, their hired guns in the think tank world, and their unwitting dupes in the press will strive to portray these losses as all for the best.

As my book, The Race to the Bottom made clear, it was a phony excuse for de-industrialization back in 1997, when former Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright touted the advent of high tech products “designed and begun in the United States and…manufactured in Asian countries,” and it’s no less dangerously off-base today.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: A Good Trump Defense Speech – but Good Enough?

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2016 election, defense, defense budget, deterrence, Donald Trump, foreign policy establishment, Madeleine Albright, Mainstream Media, military, nation-building, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, The New York Times, Wilsonianism

Donald Trump has done it again! No, I’m not talking about the Republican presidential candidate blurting out a new insult or gaffe. I’m talking about yet another speech or set of remarks that has given the nation yet another opportunity to learn an important lesson about the essentials of a sound foreign policy.

Unfortunately, as in some previous instances, Trump didn’t capitalize adequately on this opportunity, and thereby sowed the seeds of confusion – especially in the ranks of a Mainstream Media too thoroughly imbued with and enthusiastic about establishment conventional wisdom to cover this subject objectively, let alone intelligently.

Trump’s latest chance to teach some badly needed diplomatic common sense came yesterday in his speech in Philadelphia on military readiness. Its two main points entailed a promise to increase American military spending greatly, and an attack on Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent, as an out-of-control, indeed “trigger happy,” global interventionist.

Almost instinctively, the establishment media, along with numerous national security types I follow on Twitter, claimed to have caught Trump in a major contradiction. As two New York Times correspondents put it, the maverick tycoon repeated his “at times paradoxical approach of using fiery oratory to promise a military buildup and the immediate destruction of the Islamic State, while also rejecting the nation-building and interventionist instincts of George W. Bush’s administration.”

In other words, Trump is by and large proposing spending huge – and possibly unaffordable – sums to pay for a military that he doesn’t intend to use much. The clear implication: Could anything be more stupid and wasteful?

In a narrow sense, Times reporters Ashley Parker and Matthew Rosenberg committed the common but nonetheless inexcusable mistake of assuming that someone who opposes military or other forms of intervention anywhere must logically oppose them everywhere. And vice versa. It’s as if every area of the world or every situation faced by the United States presents threats or opportunities of exactly the same magnitude.

In a more fundamental sense, however, the Times‘ critique harkens back to a question posed by Clinton-era Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, when she challenged the first Bush administration’s broadly circumspect approach to using force abroad: “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” And this view is just as ditzy as the above all-or-nothing position.

To anyone even minimally schooled in national security strategy, it should have been embarrassingly and immediately clear that Albright hadn’t heard of the concept of deterrence. It’s been the overriding reason that countries, including the United States, have developed and maintained nuclear forces after America dropped atomic bombs in Japan in World War II.

But deterrence alone is also entirely valid justification for building and maintaining a strong conventional military. And it’s in no way intrinsically incompatible with the kind of relatively non-interventionist foreign policy instincts Trump has revealed. Indeed, as I have written, no approach to world affairs could make more sense for a country as fundamentally secure and economically self-reliant as the United States.

It’s entirely possible that Trump is wrong in his specific assessments of America’s most important international interests and how best to defend and promote them. But his suggestion that military strength has major value in and of itself, and that this value has no intrinsic bearing on how active or passive the nation should be in the international arena, is beyond informed criticism.

Trump did use in this speech the phrase “Peace through strength,” which in other circumstances would make the point nicely. Ditto for the follow-on claim that “President Obama and Hillary Clinton have also overseen deep cuts in our military, which only invite more aggression from our adversaries.” Similarly, he resolved “to deter, avoid and prevent conflict through our unquestioned military strength.”

But to an electorate and a foreign policy establishment and a national press corps accustomed to equating strength with interventionism, it wasn’t close to satisfactory. And Trump himself compounded the confusion by repeatedly referring to tactics and goals suggesting that he buys this idea, too. Hence his references to achieving “a stable, peaceful world with less conflict and more common ground”; to “promoting regional stability, and producing an easing of tensions in the world”; to “[making] new friends, [rebuilding] old alliances, and [bringing] new allies into the fold”; to promoting “gradual reform” in the terminally dysfunctional Middle East”; to “promoting our system and our government and our way of life as the best in the world…”

None of these goals is objectionable in and of itself. In the abstract, they’re of course admirable. But without the kinds of “When?”, “Where?”, and “How much?” questions he never asked, these objectives degenerate into the kind of grandiose, and even reckless, Wilsonianism that Trump’s previous attacks on “nation-building” have indicated he opposes.

Nor is it comforting to assume that Trump and his advisers stuck these stock phrases into the speech to assure voters that he’s solidly traditional in key respects, or to reach out to those conservatives more enamored with American global assertiveness. For such rhetoric always threatens to raise expectations and set the kinds of interventionist traps into which even the most cautious presidents have fallen. (Unless you think Lyndon Johnson relished the prospect of sending 500,000 American soldiers into Vietnam?)

Trump still has several weeks to flesh out his foreign policy approach more coherently and more sensibly. He could also wind up waiting to start staging teachable moments until he’s installed in the White House. But given the pace and unpredictability of world events, he shouldn’t assume that time is an ally in this respect.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: McCain’s Call for a New Security Strategy…Isn’t

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Brent Scowcroft, Caspar Weinberger, defense budget, foreign policy establishment, George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, internationalism, John McCain, Madeleine Albright, national interests, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Shultz-Weinberger debate, Zbigniew Brzezinski

To a degree, new Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain deserves praise for holding a series of hearings on “Global Challenges and the U.S. National Security Strategy.” Heaven knows signs abound that today’s strategy could use intensive scrutiny. Kudos to the Arizona Republican, too, for urging “a strategy-driven [defense] budget, not budget-driven strategy.” The worst approach a wealthy country like the United States can take to safeguarding its security and prosperity would be to put some arbitrary level of expenditures in the driver’s seat.  (See “sequester.”)

Unfortunately, McCain’s hearings so far have epitomized everything that’s seriously wrong with the way Washington debates foreign policy. Chiefly, it limits the participants to representatives of the mainstream liberal and conservative wings of modern American internationalism. In other words, it seeks the views only of figures who strongly support – and in many cases, have carried out – a doctrine holding that the nation’s safety and well-being literally are inseparable from the safety and well-being of every corner of the world. As I’ve written for many years, the only important differences between liberal and conservative internationalists have concerned the tactics best suited to achieve these limitless internationalist goals in any particular set of circumstances.

Doubt me? Just look at the witness list. Former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger, George Shultz and Madeleine Albright, former national security advisors Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft, and a few former senior military officers (whose job doesn’t include developing strategies, only carrying out their military dimensions).  More important, read through their various statements.

I’m not saying that none of these figures has anything useful to contribute to the debate. Certainly their experiences and views are all worth considering. In addition, Kissinger has written some exceptionally thoughtful histories and analyses of American foreign policy. (Although he’s also indulged in much confusing and contradictory quasi-internationalism, as I recently noted here.) Shultz, for his part, engaged in an intriguing debate with then-Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger in the 1980s about when the nation should use military force to accomplish goals. (Although, as I’ve written, the debate focused heavily on tactics, and both participants made thoroughly contradictory points about setting realistic foreign policy goals).

The point is that the merits of what might be called liberal and conservative foreign policy universalism are constantly argued in Congress and in the Mainstream Media. One set of more fundamental alternatives has been presented in my own writings over the years. Many others worth thinking about are available also. If McCain – and the rest of the foreign policy establishment – really believe that new foreign policy approaches are needed, it’s high time they paid them heed. But if the establishmentarians simply think that their own version of internationalism should be substituted for the one prevailing today, they should drop the pretense of seeking innovation.