Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Desperately Needed Common Sense About North Korea and Asia

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alliances, Asia, Australia, China, deterrence, Hugh White, Indo-Pacific, National Security Strategy, North Korea, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Trade, Trump

How nice it would be if the United States had, like forever, or even close, to figure out how to resolve the North Korea crisis safely and peacefully. That’s far from the case, of course, which is why I found this recent Bloomberg interview with a noted Australian strategist so bittersweet to read.

One the one hand, although he didn’t address the scary situation on the Korean peninsula created by the Pyongyang regime’s progress in building nuclear weapons that can strike the American homeland, this strategist did join me in asking the key question that American leaders have so irresponsibly ignored at least since the Cold War came to an end. On the other hand, it’s awfully late in the game, and official Washington is still in evasion mode.

The big question broached by Hugh White, a former top adviser to the Australian government and leading writer on Asian security affairs: Whether it should be a top American priority to preserve its decades-long position as East Asia’s leading power against a steadily intensifying challenge from China.

For all its alleged and even sometime stated determination to disrupt the central assumptions underlying U.S. foreign policy since not only the Cold War but even the end of World War II, the Trump administration has answered this question with an emphatic “Yes.” According to its National Security Strategy document, released last December, the Asia-Pacific region (which it now calls the “Indo-Pacific,” in order to emphasize India’s importance in achieving U.S. aims:

“The region, which stretches from the west coast of India to the western shores of the United States, represents the most populous and economically dynamic part of the world. The U.S. interest in a free and open Indo-Pacific extends back to the earliest days of our republic.” And for good measure, it discusses American policy in this area before it turns to Europe.

The document also explicitly states that the main challenge to this freedom and openness so long prized by the United States comes from Beijing. China is accused of “using economic inducements and penalties, influence operations, and implied military threats to persuade other states to heed its political and security agenda” and of mounting “a rapid military modernization campaign designed to limit U.S. access to the region and provide China a freer hand there.”

And the President himself has insisted that America’s alliance with South Korea – and the need to protect it from its northern neighbor despite the growing nuclear threat to the United States – “is more important than ever to peace and security on the Korean Peninsula and across the Indo-Pacific region.”

As I’ve repeatedly written, I completely disagree – especially given not only the quantum leap in the North Korean nuclear threat, but China’s impressively growing nuclear capabilities as well (which of course mean that the U.S.’ determination to keep the South China Sea free of Chinese control has become much more dangerous, too). So it is more than high time for American leaders to fall out of love with diplomatic boilerplate and start asking themselves what possible benefits – whether in the national security or economic fields – can possibly compete with the risk of nuclear warheads landing on American soil.

Because White is a big name in the field, it’s encouraging to see him making a point like this – which directly clashes with the conventional wisdom that the United States would face disaster if China gained the ability to set the framework for doing business in the Indo-Pacific, or whatever you want to call it. If China prevailed, White told a journalist this past week:

“Of course America will remain a major economic player globally, and in Asia, for as far ahead as we can see….Its position will be like that of the Europeans, who trade and invest massively in Asia without any real strategic presence there.

“Of course, that will mean that America will have to engage economically within the terms set by a regional strategic order led by others — presumably by China. That won’t be ideal for America, but it would be better than the alternative, if the alternative is to confront China in a bitter all-out contest for regional leadership in which China enjoys many asymmetric advantages. A contest like that would most likely be much more damaging to America economically than accepting the rules in Asia as set by China.”:

For the record, I can’t imagine that even a U.S. military withdrawal from East Asia would result in China “writing the economic rules” for the simple reason that the United States would remain such a supremely important market for the region’s economies – which remain heavily dependent on racking up export sales and trade surpluses for their growth. Indeed, given the massive deficits America keeps amassing with these same countries, and the towering trade barriers maintained by allies like Japan and South Korea, it’s hard to understand the argument that the U.S. military presence has created any net benefits for the American economy at all during any period.

But White’s point about possible economic losses paling before potential security disasters is of paramount importance – precisely because the threats now posed by American adversaries are nuclear in nature.  And this development makes the case for an American military pullback even more compelling. That’s why we should all hope like heck that someone with some influence on the Trump administration reads these statements by White. The stakes of getting U.S. Asia policy right are rapidly approaching the life and death zone for millions of Americans.. 

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: New White House Blueprint Flunks the Main Test of Strategy

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allies, budget, energy, Middle East, milieu goals, national interests, National Security Strategy, Obama, oil, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, resources, Russia, sequester, strategy

I was of course planning to read the entire new U.S. National Security Strategy statement released last Friday by the White House before posting on it, but my plans have been upended, at least for now, by the sheer number of ditzy statements in President Obama’s two-page introduction.  (After all, he’s the boss.)

Here’s the first (it’s clear that this document will be blogging fodder for many days going forward): The president’s ideas flunk the most basic test of a successful strategy – aligning ends and means on a sustainable basis.  He seems to be no more willing than any of his post-World War II predecessors to deal seriously with the dangerous contrast between the sweeping, and indeed millennial goals set for the nation’s foreign policy on the one hand, and the finite amount of resources inevitably available to pursue these goals on the other. Indeed, it’s arguable that the gap between Mr. Obama’s views on the wherewithal that can be brought to bear on international objectives (or at least, his views on the resources that should be brought to bear), and the objectives he seeks, is unusually large by historical standards.

In his introduction to the strategy document, the president speaks of (in order of appearance):

>”shaping the opportunities of tomorrow”:

>”promoting global security and prosperity as well as the dignity and human rights of all people”;

>”confronting the acute challenges posed by aggression, terrorism, and disease”:

>”cementing an international consensus on arresting climate change”;

>”shaping global standards for cybersecurity”:

>”advancing human rights and building new coalitions to combat corruption and support open governments and open societies”:

>”defending our interests and upholding our commitments to allies and partners”; and

>”countering the ideology and root causes of violent extremism”:

It’s important to note that none of these objectives is accompanied by any geographical limitations. In other words, the United States is going to seek these goals everywhere. These positions are nothing more than the president’s distinctive version of the utopian – and bipartisanly supported – milieu goals that have led the nation so disastrously astray so often, and which in fact conveniently define most genuinely strategic challenges and dilemmas out of existence. 

To be fair, the president does address resource issues. He touts the multi-dimensional strengths of the American economy, which certainly looks good compared with the economies of most major allies and, among rivals, Russia. But is a recovery still heavily dependent on unprecedentedly loose monetary policies a strong enough foundation for such worldwide endeavors?  

Mr. Obama also promises to “continue to insist on budgets that safeguard our strength and work with the Congress to end sequestration, which undercuts our national security.” In addition, he emphasizes the importance of contributions from allies, although wheezing economies in Japan and Western Europe, along with the chronic internal weaknesses, to put it kindly, of Middle East partners appear to make these countries less reliable than ever.

But in the same preface listing all those ambitious goals, the president also specifies that although the nation will “lead from a position of strength,” this “does not mean we can or should attempt to dictate the trajectory of all unfolding events around the world. As powerful as we are and will remain, our resources and influence are not infinite.” He adds that “we have to make hard choices among many competing priorities, and we must always resist the over-reach that comes when we make decisions based upon fear.”  Not a word is devoted to what these priorities and hard choices might be, or how the president proposes to make these decisions.

Just as serious, the president makes no acknowledgment that the nation’s unrivaled strength and geopolitical security argues, even in at least some cases, for less, rather than more international engagement, or at least moving toward that goal (e.g., in the Middle East, whose role as an energy supplier has been greatly reduced by the boom in America’s domestic energy production).  In this post, I sketch out some of the case for such retrenchment.

That’s just one reason that it seems long overdue to rename this series of National Security Strategy blueprints. National Security Wish List is much more appropriate.