Our So-Called Foreign Policy: How Much Change Will the Afghanistan Debacle Really Bring?

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Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, Biden, Central America, Donald Trump, failed states, globalism, Immigration, migration, nation-building, Northern Triangle, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, terrorism, The National Interest, Vietnam War

Since just yesterday, two big articles in the Mainstream Media have told us that President Biden’s latest speech on America’s (going-going-gone?) military involvement in Afghanistan could usher in a new, more circumspect era for U.S. foreign policy. (See here and here.) Me, I’m not so sure, even though I’d like to see nothing better, since I’ve been calling for such changes for no fewer than 35 years.

In fact, it’s not even clear whether Mr. Biden’s decision to pull the plug on this longest of America’s wars will profoundly influence America’s approach to world affairs on the level of day-to-day operations. For example, the President has insisted that “I was not going to extend this forever war. And I was not extending a forever exit”; and that with the Al Qaeda threat to attack the U.S. homeland and American allies squelched; and that the United States has “no vital interest in Afghanistan.” Nonethless, he still declared that “We will maintain the fight against terrorism in Afghanistan and other countries.”

Moreover, Mr. Biden acknowledged that the “over-the-horizon capabilities” that now enable attacks on “terrorists and targets” without fighting ground wars (through drone strikes and the like) will still require some “American boots on the ground.” That’s because you need some physical presence in order to identify and track the targets (which move around a lot), and because these forces need bases of some kind out of which to operate.

Further, the President claimed that “The terror threat has metastasized across the world, well beyond Afghanistan. We face threats from Al Shabab in Somalia, Al Qaeda affiliates in Syria and the Arabian Peninsula, and ISIS attempting to create a caliphate in Syria and Iraq and establishing affiliates across Africa and Asia.”

Even if he thinks that those over-the-horizon capabilities can suddenly meet this challenge (and obviously, they can’t now, or else we’d have seen a lot more of them and a much faster Afghanistan troop pullout), we’re talking about a non-trivial number of American boots on the ground in a huge number of countries – including more than a few states as failed, or as always-mythical, as Afghanistan.

President Biden was also pretty emphatic about “moving on” from what he suggested was the post-September 11 mindset of nation-building in places like Afghanistan – where democracy and unity and even cohesion has “never” existed.

But take another look at his “Strategy to Address the Root Causes of Migration in Central America.” The idea is to turn El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras into places acceptable enough to live in to convince huge portions of their populations to remain there, rather than seek better lives in the United States. And to achieve this aim, the administration’s blueprint “identifies, prioritizes, and coordinates actions to improve security, governance, human rights, and economic conditions in the region.”

That sounds pretty nation building-y to me, even if you believe that, unlike Afghanistan, these “Northern Triangle” countries have ever deserved to be called “nations” to begin with – rather than simply relatively large groups of very poor people exploited by (rotating) smaller groups of people possessing enough money and guns to climb to and stay on top for a while.

And since all the countries and regions that Mr. Biden has identified as new sources of terrorism suffer many of the same problems, there’s no reason to rule out the administration eventually dreaming up similar plans for them. According to the President’s speech, that would certainly be preferable to putting more American military boots on the ground.

But there’s a more fundamental reason to doubt that the President will engineer a major shift even in nation-building-type policies, much less in American foreign policy’s broader direction: Although the label didn’t emerge until after the September 11 attacks, nation-building has always been a core precept of the globalist approach that American foreign policy has carried out since Pearl Harbor, and Mr. Biden is a long-time card-carrying globalist. That’s the “back” to which he so proudly proclaimed America would return during his presidency.  

I explained what I mean by that most recently in a 2018 article for The National Interest. Globalism’s root assumption, I wrote, “has stemmed from the ostensibly timeless lessons of the nation’s 1930s indifference to aggression in Europe and Asia: that America’s security, freedom and prosperity are inseparable from the security, freedom and prosperity of a critical mass of the rest of the world in which trouble anywhere is sure to spread like wildfire unless checked.” And to prevent such contagions from emerging to begin with, “the entire global environment needed to be managed adequately” – including turning failed states and other breeding grounds for terrorism and all sorts of turmoil and instability into entities that are substantially better, or at least more tranquil.

That same article pointed out, however, that globalism’s grip on American foreign policy is so tight that even an avowed disrupter and America First champion like Donald Trump couldn’t shake it off completely – and even doubled down on some major globalist policies (like deepening America’s – nuclear – commitment to Europe’s security against Russian expansionism). Indeed, his Middle East and anti-terrorism policies were especially conflicted – as he himself admitted.

So the likeliest transformation I can envision for post-Afghanistan U.S. foreign policy is what I’ve called “globalism on the cheap” – retaining every ounce of this strategy’s grandiose objectives, but pretending that they can be pursued exclusively in neat, safe, and aesthetically appealing ways. In fact, this was the course chosen after another foreign policy debacle – the Vietnam War. And revealingly, Mr. Biden touted some of them yesterday: “diplomacy, economic tools, and rallying the rest of the world for support” (along with those over-the-horizon capabilities).

These and other tactics in principle can have their place in U.S. foreign policy, depending on circumstances. But calling them substitutes for major military deployments and operations in carrying out a globalist strategy is first-order misinformation spreading. And it makes me wonder just how damagingly globalism, on the cheap or otherwise, will need to fail before genuinely new foreign policy eras will begin.

 

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Im-Politic: Good Luck to Biden Keeping Up with Immigration’s Root Causes

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Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden, Biden administration, Caribbean, Central America, Cuba, Department of Homeland Security, economic development, Haiti, Im-Politic, Immigration, Kamala Harris, Latin America, Mexico, nation-building, Northern Triangle, Western Hemisphere

Remember that advertising campaign launched by Jamaica a few decades ago, reminding Americans that “We’re more than a beach. We’re a country”? Lately it seems that the area’s islands are doing their best to reinforce this message, in the process presenting yet more reasons to doubt that President Biden’s policy of stemming immigration largely by addressing its “root causes” in the sending countries (especially in Central America’s “Northern Triangle”) will produce results in the policy- (and politics-relevant) future.

After all, in the last week alone, not only has Haiti lapsed into chaos again, but Cuba has been roiled by what are being described the biggest protests in decades against Communist rule. So undoubtedly heading state-side is looking especially attractive in those countries now. In addition, Venezuela keeps looking like a candidate for a political explosion (its migrant outflows have already been considerable for years as the left-wing regime’s policies keep destroying the economy).

Nor do these countries exhaust the list of deeply troubled countries whose inhabitants are increasingly flocking to the U.S.-Mexico border. As the Washington Post reported earlier this month, U.S. government data show that “From South America, the Caribbean, Asia and beyond tens of thousands of migrants bound for the United States have been arriving to Mexico each month.” Further, the shares represented by Mexico and Central America are going down, and those of nationals from “beyond” are going up. Many more migrants from regions further afield, moreover, are apparently on the way.

Indeed, in 2018, Gallup research found that more than 150 million adults worldwide want to live in the United States permanently. Of course, not every one will try to migrate. Nor does every one come from a homeland afflicted by various combinations of poverty, dictatorship, corruption, major disorder, and out-and-out conflict. But clearly most of them do. Meaning that there’s a massive amount of root causes out there to be addressed if that approach is to be the Biden strategy’s main pillar long term.

And it’s not like Washington has a great record in promoting the kind of nation-building (see, e.g., here) or even narrower economic development needed to root out those causes, or that lots more money – public or private – will be forthcoming (assuming that money is even the biggest obstacle to begin with). Heck – Americans haven’t even done a decent job of addressing the root causes of violence in many of their own inner cities.

Therefore, given the high and growing amount of turmoil in the United States’ backyard and beyond, to avoid swamping the nation with ever greater numbers of migrants, the Biden administration will need to return American policy to a border security-centric approach. It’s true that both Vice President and immigration point person Kamala Harris and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas have both publicly warned not to try to enter the country.

But this message clearly has been drowned out by dozens of other administration decisions that de facto put out the welcome mat (see, e.g., here) – including a virtual halt to interior enforcement that supercharges the odds that newcomers who make it into the United States will be able to stay in the United States. Which is why the longer the current Biden policy mix lasts, the more the root causes dimension of his administration’s immigration strategy looks like a dodge aimed at greasing the skids for much wider border opening.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: A Neglected Lesson of Afghanistan

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Afghanistan, Biden, border security, China, Donald Trump, forever wars, globalism, Immigration, jihadism, Muslims, nation-building, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, special forces, Tajikistan, Taliban, terrorism, Uighurs, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, women's rights, Xinjiang

Let’s get one matter straight right away: When it comes to the (always important) optics, and to humanitarian considerations, there is no good way for the United States to end its military involvement in Afghanistan that would meet any sensible or decent person’s definition of “good.”

Indeed, much of the news that’s come out of that war-torn country (and I use that term advisedly) is sickeningly reminiscent of the final U.S. pullout from Vietnam in April, 1975 – complete with the almost certain abandonment of many locals who had cast their lot with the Americans in various ways, and therefore face many forms of retaliation if the jihadist Taliban do indeed triumph.

Further, the U.S. departure could produce an Afghan aftermath far worse than that suffered in Vietnam, as the social and economic strides made by many Afghan women of all ages under the umbrella of the American presence seem to be doomed if the country is taken over by a movement wed to Islam’s most misogynistic version.

In fact, a couple of years ago, by which time the American mission’s failure looked inevitable, I came up with the idea of offering all Afghan females asylum in the United States – complete with transportation expenses. I never published it, but wouldn’t it have served the women-haters right to leave them as women-free as possible?

That chance looks to be gone – though I’m still hoping that somehow the interpreters and other U.S. employees can be saved. Otherwise, the best that Americans can hope for now is figuring out what went wrong and how to avoid such fiascoes going forward. There’s been no shortage of post-mortems, and especially encouraging has been the bipartisan globalist U.S. foreign policy establishment’s (belated) agreement that nation-building where no true nation exists is folly. (See, e.g., here.)

Another big lesson, however, remains largely unlearned – even by long-time opponents of the Afghan War like former President Trump: As I’ve written repeatedly, since the only self-interested (and therefore sensible) reason for direct American involvement in the first place was preventing the country’s re-emergence as an officially sponsored and protected base for September 11-like terrorism, Washington should have focused on seriously securing U.S. borders rather than on fighting the jihadis “over there.”

Trump tried in his own characteristically ragged way to beef up border protection, and achieved some impressive progress. But as made clear here, he never seemed to make the connection fully. And now President Biden appears determined to create the worst of all possible worlds from the U.S. standpoint – an Afghanistan policy unlikely to enable the Tailban’s containment through special forces guerilla-type operations until the U.S. border was strengthened adequately, and an immigration policy that actually opens the border still wider.

Meanwhile, a third big lesson hasn’t evidently even made it onto official or unofficial U.S. policy screens (including mine), but it was suggested in this Bloomberg news item on Monday: A Taliban-run Afghanistan could well have been kept off balance – and frustrated in its efforts undertake the major initiatives needed to foster September 11-scale terrorism – by the nearby countries its extremism would surely have alarmed and antagonized. And these regional concerns seem compelling enough to keep the lid on in Afghanistan by hook or by crook from this point on in the American military’s absence.

As the piece makes clear, in the near term, smallish Afghanistan neighbors like Tajikistan and Uzbekistan are anxious to prevent chaos on their borders – including no doubt massive refugee flows. And both countries have long been cooperating with Washington for many years to bolster “overall regional security” – which won’t be helped by a jihadist regime in their midst. (See here and here.)

And don’t forget Russia – whose help those two central Asian countries are seeking. Its own disastrous 1979 invasion and decade-long occupation of much of the country was triggered largely by fears that the rise of Islamic extremism in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East would infect the Muslim populations of adjacent Soviet “republics” (like Tajikistan and Uzbekistan). Moscow can’t be anxious to repeat that mistake, but the fear of jihadis persists, and like it or not, Russia’s deep reinvolvement in Afghanistan consequently seems inevitable – and bound to cause big problems for the Taliban.

China’s bound to be pulled in, too. All indications are that Beijing hopes to keep post-U.S.-withdrawal Afghanistan stable in a softer way – with big economic development projects that ironically look a lot like nation-building (though apparently lacking its political dimension). More power to Chinese dictator Xi Jinping if he succeeds. But mainly because it’s had its own huge problems (many surely self-created) with its own Muslim population in Xinjiang province (which also shares a short border with Afghanistan) China’s bottom line clearly is maintaining stability and making sure that Afghanistan doesn’t become “a haven or transit corridor” for the Uyghur militants who have aroused its ire. (See the above-linked Economist piece for the quote.)

As a result, it’s more than a little interesting that a Chinese academic recently felt free to tell a Financial Times reporter that “Even though China has for a long time been extremely cautious about sending military forces overseas, if it is supported by a United Nations resolution, China might join an international peacekeeping team to enter Afghanistan.”

Alternatively, the Chinese bet that they can cultivate the Taliban’s pragmatic instincts by financing massive road-building and mining operations could pay off – in which case, the terror-base scenario feared in the United State may not materialize.

But the crucial strategic insight for Americans is that China and all of Afghanistan’s neighbors have compelling stakes in curbing Taliban jihadism and related terrorism, and that these stakes exist precisely because Afghanistan’s in their own neighborhood – and always has been. In other words, however important Afghanistan’s stability, moderation, etc has been for Americans thousands of miles away, it’s always been and remains far more important for the folks right next door. Even better, because some big powers are involved, a strong case can be made not only for their persistence in addressing the problem but their success.

If they fail, however, or get bogged down in their own forever war, that’s OK from the U.S. perspective as well – because they’ll keep the Taliban too busy to concentrate on attacking America. That’s not to say that the United States can therefore forget about sealing the border. After all, Afghanistan is hardly the world’s only concentration of jihadis.

But it does mean that the strategic case for the United States carrying the burden of intervening in Afghanistan specifically is weakening; that the case may have been weak all along – or at least once the Taliban was ousted from power and significantly weakened right after September 11 – and that as long as the neighbors can be relied on to act in their own self-interest (surely a long time), and especially if Washington tends to its border knitting, this case won’t emerge again.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Democrats Embrace (Disastrously Failed) Nation-Building

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Afghanistan, America First, Democratic Party, Democratic platform, Democrats, forever wars, globalism, Immigration, Iraq, Middle East, nation-building, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, p, terrorism, Vietnam War

Longstanding conventional wisdom holds that political party platforms are usually either meaningless, just for show, or exercises in pandering various constituencies. And when I finished reading the Democrats’ latest version, I thought to myself, “Let’s hope so!”

My main concerns don’t revolve around those planks that have received the most attention – notably surrounding the treatment of Medicare for All and healthcare for illegal aliens and violent crime/police defunding) and climate change and the Green New Deal. (Actually, as I read it, the document generally was less far Left on these issues than presidential nominee Joe Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris, were during the primary campaign.) To be sure, they’re still concerns. My main concern, though, has to do with a lower profile, but still crucial issue, and one that was widely ignored both during the primaries and at last week’s convention: foreign policy.

Specifically, in contrast to the tightrope walking evident when it came to the hot button topics, the platform went all-in on nation-building.

To some extent, this was no surprise. For whether they belong to the party’s center or its progressive wing, nearly all Democrats are globalists. They have, and will continue, to disagree strongly about specific ways to conduct globalist foreign policies – e.g., whether to intervene militarily or not in certain foreign conflicts or crises, or the related issue of whether generally to rely more on the military or on diplomacy or on foreign aid as the tool of first resort. But nearly all accept the central tenet of globalism, which is the belief that the United States can never be acceptably free, secure and prosperous unless the rest of the world is acceptably free, secure, and prosperous. And this approach inevitably involves nation-building – trying to turn unsuccessful countries and even entire regions into something they have never been, or have not been for centuries: successful countries and regions..

So what, you might ask? Here’s what. As logical as nation-building sounds, it’s been responsible for three of the most damaging foreign policy disasters in recent American history – the Vietnam War, the second Iraq War, and an Afghanistan operation that began as a needed anti-terrorism campaign and steadily expanded into a sweeping effort not only to build a nation but to create one where none had ever existed. And let’s not forget minor blunders like ill-starred peace-keeping efforts in Haiti and Somalia.

In fact, nation-building has been so discredited that even many globalists have been pouring cold water on it lately. (See, e.g., here and here.) 

But not the Democrats this year – at least judging from their platform. The phrase isn’t used – a sign that the term has become toxic. But it’s there, all the same – and in spades. For example:

p. 64: “Democrats will address the root causes of [international] migration—violence and insecurity, poverty, pervasive corruption, lack of educational and economic opportunity, and the impacts of climate change. Disciplined American leadership and well-designed assistance programs can help prevent and mitigate the effects of migration crises around the world, from Southeast Asia to Sub-Saharan Africa to Central America.”

p. 76: “Rather than occupy countries and overthrow regimes to prevent terrorist attacks, Democrats will prioritize more effective and less costly diplomatic, intelligence, and law enforcement tools….And we will mobilize our partners to make sustained investments that can prevent conflict and help extinguish the flames on which extremists feed.”

p. 82: “Democrats will sustain the global effort to defeat ISIS, al-Qaeda, and their affiliates. We will ensure that the world is equally committed to the difficult task that follows military success: dealing with the underlying conditions that allowed violent extremism to flourish in the first place.”

p. 87: “Rather than coerce our neighbors into supporting cruel migration policies, we will work with our regional and international partners to address the root causes of migration—violence and insecurity, weak rule of law, lack of educational and economic opportunity, pervasive corruption, and environmental degradation.”

p. 90: “Turning the page on two decades of large-scale military deployments and open-ended wars in the Middle East does not mean the United States will abandon a region where we and our partners still have enduring interests. Democrats believe it’s past time, however, to rebalance our tools, engagement, and relationships in the Middle East away from military intervention—leading with pragmatic diplomacy to lay the groundwork for a more peaceful, stable, and free region.”

p. 90: “Democrats…believe we need to reset our relations with our Gulf partners to better advance our interests and values. The United States has an interest in helping our partners contend with legitimate security threats; we will support their political and economic modernization and encourage efforts to reduce regional tensions.”

Especially striking about this Democratic faith in nation-building is its strength as a viable strategy for the Middle East, and the confidence that it can substitute effectively for the “forever wars” they have pledged to end (p. 72).  As has usually been the case with believers that ploughshares always work better than swords in protecting national security, they have focused on means rather than the overarching matter of ends, and defined out of existence the challenge of promoting or defending interests that they, too, view as vital when their preferred tactics prove inadequate.   

There’s really only one way out of this dilemma – adopting the kind of priority-setting America First foreign policies that not even President Trump has fully embraced (as I described at length in the National Interest piece linked above).  What a tragedy that the Democrats’ party-wide case of Trump Derangement Syndrome will surely prevent them from even considering this recipe for pragmatism, either.         

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: (Unintentional) Gifts from the Globalists

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America First, globalism, international institutions, internationalism, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Joseph S. Nye, multilaterism, nation-building, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Project-Syndicate.org, sovereignty, Trump

One of life’s great pleasures is seeing views you’ve held for decades validated by your intellectual or ideological or political opponents. And there’s a special gratification in seeing them validated unwittingly (though nothing beats outright admissions of error).

So imagine how I’m feeling today having just learned that two of America’s leading globalists have just made clear (except to themselves) that the foreign policy approaches they’ve championed for decades are, in one case, only loosely at best related to the nation’s security and prosperity and, in the other, almost suicidally moronic.

The globalist who now apparently believes that globalism is unnecessary – along with, by implication, all the costs and risks it imposes on the United States – is Harvard University political scientist and former top U.S. national security official (under Democratic presidents) Joseph S. Nye, Jr.

In an essay published yesterday on the Project Syndicate website, Nye focused on explaining why American foreign policy can never escape and should never seek to avoid efforts to advance moral objectives. I disagree – but that’s another debate. What was most intriguing to me was a central argument used to advance his case: “Some foreign policy issues relate to a nation-state’s survival, but most do not. Since World War II, the United States, for example, has been involved in several wars, but none were necessary for its survival.”

This claim may seem to be nothing more than the essence of common sense (it is). But it also happens to clash violently with the core assumption of globalism (which in the pre-Trump years was called “internationalism”). As I originally wrote here, this assumption holds that America’s security, independence, and prosperity are so completely inseparable from the security, independence, and prosperity of literally every corner of the globe that the country literally has no choice but to anchor its foreign policy to the goal of creating a world so free of security, economic, and social challenges that threats to the United States will never arise in the first place.

Subsequently, I’ve contended that, however true this argument may or may not be for other countries, it is uniquely inapplicable to the United States, due to its towering degree of geopolitical security and its equally formidable potential for economic self-sufficiency.

Leave aside for the moment the issue of whether I’m right or wrong. Nye’s acknowledgment that none – i.e., not a single one – of the (often frightfully costly) wars fought by the United States in the last seven decades was a war of necessity signals loudly and clearly that Nye (at least now) agrees with me. And if these conflicts were in fact wars of choice, then logically the various globalist policies they were intended to advance or reinforce in the name of creating that threat-free world need to be seen as optional as well – ranging from prioritizing the maintenance of international alliances and institutions to the extension of foreign aid and involvement in nation-building.

Not that their optionality means that they should always or even often be opposed. But it does mean that Americans – and especially the globalist elites that have controlled and dominated the way Americans discuss foreign policy (at least in systematic ways) – need to pay more attention to alternative approaches for achieving and maintaining adequate levels of security, independence, and prosperity. As a result, the types of America First impulses displayed by President Trump and articulated more completely by some of his like-minded compatriots (including yours truly) need to be examined carefully, not ruled out of hand with pejoratives like “isolationism” or “bullying.”

The second globalist to have made my day today is former U.S. Senator John Kerry, who of course also won the Democratic nomination for President in 2004 and then went on to serve as Secretary of State in Barack Obama’s administration.

Kerry has been campaigning for his Obama era colleague Joe Biden’s bid to win the White House this year, and this morning was shown on CNBC making the following statement while touting the former Vice President’s qualifications for the Oval Office: “He [Biden] is completely committed to the notion that before you send American troops into harm’s way, before you ask families to risk the lives of their loved ones, you owe it to everybody in the world to exhaust the capacity for diplomacy. This President has not done that.”

It’s one thing of course to support caution in using America’s military overseas. No sensible person of good will could object. But such decisions should be made with “everybody in the world” in mind? Seriously? Even national populations with absolutely no stake in the outcome? Even the population of the country being targeted? Even its leaders? Even the allies of those leaders, like Vladimir Putin? Come to think of it, what did Franklin Roosevelt owe Adolf Hitler before he declared war on Germany in 1941, beating the Nazis to that punch. Talk about a formula for endless inaction and outright paralysis – however urgent the circumstances or imminent the threat. I really try avoiding use of the word “stupid,” but if the shoe fits….

Moreover, Kerry wasn’t simply having a bad day here. He expressed almost identical views during his 2004 presidential run when he insisted that American decisions to go to war must be submitted to a “global test” of legitimacy. It’s like he either doesn’t know that the United States is a fully sovereign country, which means that according to any framework you care to use (utilitarian, legal, ethical) it is completely and unreservedly entitled to decide for itself whether its own actual or even perceived interests justify this step – or he doesn’t believe it.

I’m going with the latter answer, especially given globalism’s bottom line about the supremacy of multilateralism, – i.e., about creating, reserving, and continually strengthening international institutions as the only conceivable way to achieve that benign global environment they seek.

But my swelling head aside, let’s not forget the most important silver lining to this post. For decades, Nye and Kerry have done more than their share to push the United States into endless globalist wars, to assume needless nuclear attack risk (through the tripwire forces deployed to defend wealthy, free-riding U.S. allies), to waste massive resources on nation-building fool’s quests, and to undercut its precious sovereignty for the sake of utopian global governance dreams.

In the last 24 hours, though, they’ve strengthened the case – however unintentionally – for avoiding these blunders going forward. And I’m certainly more than happy to say “Thanks!” instead of “I told you so.”

Im-Politic: Another Possible Impeachable Offense: The Globalists’ Afghanistan War

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Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Craig Whitlock, George W. Bush, globalism, House Judiciary Committee, Im-Politic, impeachment, jihadism, Matt Gaetz, nation-building, Presidents, terrorism, Washington Post

It almost looks providential that within 48 hours, all these events transpired:

>The House Judiciary Committee continued its hearing on impeaching President Trump;

>Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, a Republican Judiciary Committee member suggested that former Presidents can be impeached; and

>The Washington Post began publishing a lengthy series documenting literally decades of official U.S. government deceit – including by former Presidents – surrounding the 18-year long war in Afghanistan.

It looks providential because if Gaetz is right (and, at least according to this analysis, there’s no legal consensus yet on the matter), it’s tough to think of more important abuses of power than the flood of dishonestly upbeat statements issuing from the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama about encouraging progress on the military and nation-building fronts in that protracted and ongoing conflict.

After all, the consequences of such abuses weren’t simply a short delay in providing military aid to a country (Ukraine) whose security and independence weren’t seen as remotely vital U.S. concerns even during the Cold War. Instead, according to Pentagon and other figures the Post cites, the war’s toll so far has included:

>2,300 dead American servicemen

>20,589 wounded in action

>Nearly one trillion taxpayer dollars – an inflation-adjusted figure that doesn’t include expenditures by the intelligence community and the costs of caring for wounded veterans.

It’s true that some of these casualties and spending date from the early years of the war – when no serious person can doubt the need to intervene militarily in Afghanistan to destroy its potential to serve as a terrorist base for planning and launching September 11-style terrorist attacks. But the vast majority date from the long years after the ouster from power of the Taliban and the destruction of Al Qaeda.

At that point, it should have been clear that the best American strategy for preventing the reemergence of jihadist organizations with global reach was maintaining small-scale special forces operations in the country that would focus on harassing extremists effectively enough to keep them off balance and incapable of organizing large-scale inter-continental violence. Stronger border security measures could also help keep them away from the U.S. homeland.  Instead, U.S. leaders embarked on campaign to nation-build in a region that historically has been so divided that no true nation had ever existed. 

(Actually, I first publicly critiqued the focus on nation-building in Afghanistan and touted the need for better border controls at a 2002 Washington, D.C. policy conference summarized here.  It wasn’t till 2014, however, when ISIS had replaced Al Qaeda as the main Middle East terrorist threat to the United States, that I first wrote about the need for harassment forces.)   

But the Bush and Obama administrations ignored this advice because they had drunk the globalist Kool-aid insisting that overseas threats can be dealt with adequately only by literally turning troubled parts of the world into the political, economic, and social successes that they have never been. These Afghanistan policies per se weren’t high crimes or misdemeanors – unless you favor criminalizing stubbornness persistent and extreme enough to qualify as stupidity.

What was arguably criminal? As documented by Post reporter Craig Whitlock, even though the documents (which exist because of a federal research project undertaken to analyze failure in Afghanistan) make clear widespread official recognition of the debacle on the ground, they “contradict a long chorus of public statements from U.S. presidents, military commanders and diplomats who assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting.”

And more to the point: “Several of those interviewed [by the project’s researchers] described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.”

I’ve only read Whitlock’s summary articles about the documents, not the documents themselves, but undoubtedly if he’d found evidence that Bush and Obama personally knew about the distortion efforts or, worse, ordered them, he’d have reported it. At the same time, determining Presidential guilt wasn’t the government research project’s mission. In fact, although the Post is still suing the government for release of the names of the more than 400 “insider” interview subjects whose statements represent most of the raw material gathered by the researchers, it’s not clear whether the two former Presidents were among them. Moreover, it appears that not all the documentary evidence produced by the project has been released, either with names attached or not.

So the question made famous by the late Tennessee Senator Howard Baker during 1973 Watergate hearings – “What did the President know, and when did he know it?” – can legitimately be asked about Bush and Obama. Any answers eventually shaken loose in impeachment or similar investigations will be too late to undo the enormous damage of the Afghanistan war to date. But they might hasten a decision by Mr. Trump finally to act on his instincts and cut the nation’s losses. More important, the prospect of sitting at a witness table might persuade future Presidents to be far less reckless when they spend America’s blood and treasure.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Real Message Sent by the Trump Security Strategy Blueprint

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alliances, allies, America First, Asia-Pacific, borders, burden sharing, China, Cold War, deterrence, Eastern Europe, Europe, free-riding, Germany, globalism, international institutions, internationalism, Japan, Middle East, nation-building, National Security Strategy, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, North Korea, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, South Korea, sovereignty, Soviet Union, terrorism

The Blob – a wonderful nickname for the Washington, D.C.-centered complex of establishmentarian foreign policy bureaucrats, former officials, think tanks, lobbyists, and journalists – has actually come up with a useful insight in noting some important contradictions between the Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) document, and the president’s speech announcing the document’s release.

It’s hardly new to observe that big differences on crucial issues seem to divide President Trump from his top advisers, though it’s always valuable to note, since this gap can’t possibly make American diplomacy more effective, and could cause real problems. My chief NSS-related concern, however, could be even more important: Mr. Trump’s speech once again demonstrates that he himself remains pretty confused about his foreign policy priorities – and not entirely convinced that priority-setting is particularly important at all.

Not that presidents are often perfectly consistent about America’s approach to international challenges and opportunities. And given the diversity of these challenges and opportunities, consistency itself can be a vastly overrated virtue – at best. But these days, much more clarity is urgently needed – especially since President Trump has touted himself as such a disrupter; especially since the America First-style disruption he touts is badly needed on many fronts, in my opinion; and especially since disruption is badly needed because some genuinely dangerous situations are nearing crisis territory, and some existing crises keep worsening.

With that backdrop in my mind, two of these clashing ideas – maybe described more accurately as sets of impulses? – stand out. The first has to do with America’s major security alliances. Mr. Trump has consistently, and in my view, understandably, complained about defense free-riding by countries in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region in particular that for decades have enjoyed protection by U.S. conventional and nuclear forces. And his December 18 NSS speech continued in this vein, scolding his White House predecessors for failing “to insist that our often very wealthy allies pay their fair share for defense, putting a massive and unfair burden on the U.S. taxpayer and our great U.S. military.”

He’s absolutely right that major economies like like Germany, Japan, and South Korea should pay far more, and not only because they can afford to do so – and free up American resources for major domestic needs in the process. They need to pay more because they face far greater threats from potential aggressors like Russia and China and North Korea than does the United States.

If President Trump would start highlighting the discrepancy – firmly based in geography – between the security challenges faced by the United States and those faced by its allies, he might actually achieve greater defense burden-sharing. But he makes a fatal mistake when boasts that his administration’s “new” strategy “emphasizes strengthening alliances to cope with these threats.  It recognizes that our strength is magnified by allies who share principles — and our principles — and shoulder their fair share of responsibility for our common security.”

For whenever the allies have heard phrases like “common security,” they have concluded that the United States can’t afford to put any meaningful pressure on them to boost defense budgets – because its own vital interests will always persuade it to fill any gaps. History could not teach more clearly the lesson that America’s failure to stress that its alliances are helpful assets, not vital necessities, and that its support for these arrangements is not unconditional, has been the kiss of death for any efforts to eliminate or reduce free-riding. And the Trump administration’s burden-sharing campaign will surely founder on exactly these shoals.

If we were living in another (past) decade, this shortcoming might be No Big Deal. After all, as I’ve previously written, America’s major alliance commitments, including their nuclear dimension, involved either pledges to protect arguably vital or potentially vital regions, or to deter adversaries, like North Korea, that couldn’t retaliate in kind against the American homeland. So it’s anything but entirely surprising that, for decades during the Cold War and after, these alliances achieved their overseas goals and kept the United States itself safe.

But the likeliest alliance-related potential flashpoints nowadays are totally different. Russia, which still has plenty of nuclear weapons, is seriously threatening only Baltic and other East European countries that were recklessly invited to join the North Atlantic Treat Organization (NATO) even though their fates have never been considered vital interests by American leaders. Even during the Cold War, America’s European allies were never entirely convinced that Washington would risk DC, or New York, to save Paris or London. It’s that much less credible to suppose that U.S. leader would risk a major American city to save Riga.

Frighteningly, however, that’s precisely a catastrophe that the United States today could suffer because it remains American strategy to deny a president any real choice but to act. And the means to this perilous end? A growing U.S. military presence in Eastern Europe not remotely strong enough to repel a Russian attack, but large enough to put irresistible political pressure on Washington to go nuclear to save it from annihilation, or to retaliate for its loss.

Such American tripwire forces remain on the Korean peninsula, too, and their tripwire mission also remains exactly the same – even though North Korea can now, or will shortly be able to, respond to American nuclear weapons use by destroying U.S. cities.

In other words, greater alliance burden-sharing – and probably much greater changes – now need to be squarely on President Trump’s table not simply to achieve greater economic equity and to finance domestic policies more responsibly. They’re needed to reduce as dramatically as possible the chances that nuclear weapons will land on American soil. But as Mr. Trump’s speech indicates, there’s no reason to suppose that he’s even considering this type of disruption.

The second set of clashing ideas or impulses has to do with the overall purpose of American foreign policy. I’ve been writing for decades that the main flaw in the internationalist approach dominating the country’s diplomacy for decades has been its insistence that the United States can be no more secure, prosperous, or free than the world at large. Therefore, internationalism (which Mr. Trump and many of his supporters tend to call “globalism”), whether in its conservative or liberal forms, has pursued a worldwide reformist and policing agenda even in areas where the United States had no tangible stakes whatever, or where the benefits never remotely approached the costs and risks.

In his NSS speech, Trump (again) rightly lambasted the archetypical post-Cold War version of this internationalism: “nation-building.” He emphasized that “We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone” and repeated an important (potentially and constructively) disruptive in marker laid down in previous addresses:

“We will pursue the vision we have carried around the world over this past year — a vision of strong, sovereign, and independent nations that respect their citizens and respect their neighbors; nations that thrive in commerce and cooperation, rooted in their histories and branching out toward their destinies.”

The point about a world of “strong, sovereign, and independent nations” represents long overdue pushback against the globalist objective of a world increasingly governed by ever more powerful international rules and institutions that can only undermine national self-rule – and are likeliest to focus on restraining U.S. freedom of action.

But the business about respecting citizens and neighbors (along with his concern about “vigorous military, economic, and political contests…now playing out all around the world”), and thriving in commerce and cooperation, too strongly resembles the standard internationalist boilerplate that has launched the nation on so many, often disastrously, misguided Americanizing missions.

And although an explicit Trump-ian return to nation-building etc seems wildly improbable, first consider the president’s description of his anti-terrorism goals in the Middle East, and then try to figure out how they can be reached without transforming this dysfunctional region into something light years from where it is now, and that it has never been: “confronting, discrediting, and defeating radical Islamic terrorism and ideology” and preventing “terrorists such as ISIS to gain control of vast parts of territory all across the Middle East.”

Far better for him to focus like the proverbial laser beam on “not letting them into the United States” – a goal that, however difficult, is far more practicable than curing what ails a remote, often hostile part of the world with which the United States has almost nothing in common.

The conventional wisdom about documents like the National Security Strategy is that they’re overwhelmingly for show, have virtually nothing to do with an administration’s day in and day out decisions, and lack any meaningful predictive power. Ditto for sweeping presidential speeches on grandiose subjects. And again, the conventional wisdom isn’t entirely wrong.

But as even cynics tend to concede, just as NSS-like reports result from the work of numerous government agencies and therefore hundreds of junior and senior officials (including political appointees), prepared presidential remarks (even in this administration) usually represent the combined efforts of many White House officials and also incorporate input from a wide range of government agencies. As a result, it’s far-fetched to suppose that they’re completely devoid of meaning. For me, they can reveal two important insights about a chief executive’s foreign policy outlook and potential.

First, as suggested above, they can yoke presidents to ill-considered and even dangerous commitments. Consequently, they can create equally ill-considered and even dangerous public expectations, too. Of course, circumstances force politicians to execute U-turns all the time, but the more obvious they are (because they reverse positions prominently staked out), the more (needlessly) damaging they can be.

Second, and more important, they speak can volumes about how well presidents can handle the challenge of making hard foreign policy choices, their related willingness to acknowledge in the first place that not all good things are possible simultaneously, or even close, and their consequent ability to establish sustainable priorities. In these respects, the president’s remarks about his administration’s first NSS display too many of the shortcomings that produced globalism’s major failures.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Afghanistan Opportunity Trump Has Missed

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Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, Barack Obama, Barry Posen, border security, George W. Bush, Iran, Iraq, ISIS, Middle East, nation-building, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, refugees, Russia, September 11, Syria, Taliban, terrorism, The Atlantic, travel ban, Trump

Although I usually oppose U.S. overseas military interventions, I can understand President Trump’s decision this week to keep significant numbers of American troops in Afghanistan and even expand the presence (to some unannounced extent). What I do find disappointing is Mr. Trump’s apparent neglect of more promising alternatives that couldn’t possibly be called “defeat” or “retreat,” and his failure to describe realistically what may be the biggest fundamental choice the nation still faces in Afghanistan.

I shouldn’t have to remind anyone that Afghanistan under Taliban rule provided the base for the Al Qaeda terrorists responsible for the September 11 attack and so many other atrocities (on top of those that they have inspired by supportive groups and individuals). So clearly conditions inside that country (a problematic term, to be sure, as will be explained below) matter for U.S. national security. And it’s hard to imagine that even most Americans who are terribly – and understandably – frustrated with the sixteen-year U.S.-dominated military operation that has followed would disagree. The main question has always been how best to defend American interests.

After the Taliban were overthrown by a (highly successful) U.S.-led military campaign in the fall of 2001, Presidents Bush and Obama tragically opted for a standard American counter-insurgency effort to keep the Taliban out of power that combined continued military pressure on their remaining forces and strongholds with programs to promote Afghan economic, social, and political reform.

As critics (including me) predicted, this strategy of “nation-building” failed mainly because Afghanistan lacked the crucial prerequisites for nation-hood to begin with. So several years ago, as the Taliban began mounting a comeback largely as a result, I began supporting a fundamentally different approach: abandoning reform efforts and focusing on securing the United States’ essential aim in Afghanistan – preventing the Taliban or similar groups from consolidating control in enough territory to reestablish a safe haven capable of generating more terrorism.

This strategy would still involve U.S. military forces. But their top priority by far would not be supporting whatever Afghan government military exists, or training such forces (unless some especially promising units can be identified). Instead, the main American mission would be harassing the Taliban and its allies sufficiently to prevent that territorial consolidation, and the main instruments would be special forces and air strikes. And I argued that such operations could prevent ISIS in Iraq and Syria from posing a similar threat. Finally, I recommended that this approach be supplemented – and eventually superseded – by strengthening the security of America’s borders, to reduce greatly the likelihood that terrorists that still might originate from Afghanistan or anywhere else could actually reach the U.S. homeland.

The main advantages of this approach were, initially, concentrating American efforts on overseas goals that seemed both vital and attainable, as opposed to desirable for non-essential; and recognizing that the U.S. government ultimately is much likelier to succeed in controlling access to the United States than in comprehensively manipulating events in far-off lands.

In his speech this week, President Trump did a good job in describing the urgency of continuing to deny terrorists a safe haven in Afghanistan. But although he (once again) disparaged nation-building, he also paid it enough lip service to make clear that the basic goal remains in place. For example, he argued that “Military power alone will not bring peace to Afghanistan or stop the terrorist threat arising in that country” and asked India (and possibly America’s European allies) to “help us more with Afghanistan, especially in the area of economic assistance and development.” Surprisingly, moreover, he never connected his Afghanistan strategy with his so-far successful efforts to control American borders more effectively. Indeed, Mr. Trump didn’t even mention his proposed suspension of travel from terrorist-wracked countries (a list that, oddly, never included Afghanistan itself).

And the picture drawn by the President of his ultimate objective(s) was confusing, at best. Notably, on the one hand, he insisted that “From now on, victory will have a clear definition:  attacking our enemies, obliterating ISIS, crushing al Qaeda, preventing the Taliban from taking over Afghanistan, and stopping mass terror attacks against America before they emerge.” On the other, he stated that the “strategically applied force” his administration will apply in Afghanistan “aims to create the conditions for a political process to achieve a lasting peace.” Still more puzzlingly, he allowed that a political settlement could include “elements of the Taliban.” To be sure, in a technical sense, these objectives aren’t mutually exclusive. But they sure don’t coexist easily, at least not at this point.

One especially worrisome consequence of this Presidential rhetoric is its suggestion, however cautious, that there’s an ultimate, satisfactory solution in Afghanistan that results from continuing U.S. involvement, at least in the foreseeable future. Much skepticism is warranted, mainly because the chances of Afghanistan becoming something politically cohesive enough to “take ownership of their future, to govern their society,” in Mr. Trump’s words, flies in the face of so much of this area’s history.

But that doesn’t mean that the United States should simply pull up stakes, either now, or somewhere down the road – because of that safe haven threat. My own preferred strategy would have resulted in America’s leaders acknowledging that Afghanistan is not a problem to be solved but, as if often true in world affairs, a condition that requires continual management – and then explaining that some forms of management are vastly more realistic, and cheaper, than others.

Nonetheless, an even more appealing alternative has emerged over the last week. In an August 18 article in The Atlantic, MIT political scientist Barry Posen made the case for a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan based on the intriguing observation that the countries neighbors, Russia and Iran, both have compelling interests in ensuring that the Taliban and similar groups don’t return to power. In the words of the piece’s title, the aim would be “to make Afghanistan someone else’s problem.”

Of course, I couldn’t help but notice that this proposal strongly resembles my recommendation for handling the challenge of increasingly powerful North Korean nuclear weapons. I’m also impressed, though, by Posen’s observation that both Russia (which is vulnerable to Islamic extremism infecting its own sizable Muslim population) and Iran (a Shia Muslim-dominated country theologically opposed to Sunni groups like the Taliban and Al Qaeda) have compelling reasons to frustrate America’s enemies in Afghanistan.

Posen also intriguingly responds to fears that a combined Russian-Iranian success would strengthen those anti-American countries’ efforts to dominate the entire Middle East. As he points out, Pakistan and China both would find this prospect alarming, too, and would seek to check Russian and Iranian influence.

Is Posen’s scheme fool-proof? Of course not. But it looks at least as promising as Mr. Trump’s plan, and it’s discouraging that this supremely, if Machiavellian, America-First strategy apparently wasn’t even considered by the Trump administration in its efforts to fix a badly broken U.S. Afghanistan policy.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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