Our So-Called Foreign Policy: A Call to Return to Failed U.S. China Strategies

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alliances, allies, Barack Obama, Biden, China, Donald Trump, engagement, FOREIGNPOLICY.com, George W. Bush, Indo-Pacific, intellectual property theft, Michael J. Green, national security, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Paul Haenle, tech transfer, TPP, Trans-Pacific Partnership, World Trade Organization, WTO

When it comes to China-related issues in particular, supposed American experts who have long completely missed the mark have developed a head-exploding habit of assuming that they have anything useful to say on the matter going forward. Here’s a recent example.

Now these failed economic and foreign policy establishmentarians have hit new heights (or is is “depths”?) of chutzpah. As laid out in this article last week on FOREIGN POLICY magazine’s website, two typical figures are now attacking President Biden’s approach to the People’s Republic for taking too Trump-ian a turn, and blaming his alleged mistakes on learning the wrong lessons from the records of pre-Trump Presidents.

Whereas both the Biden and Trump teams, they write, have accused their predecessors of naively assuming that “engagement would lead to a democratic and cooperative China,” in fact, since the initial Nixon Era opening to Beijing, American leaders have fully understood that China’s democratization could never be a foregone conclusion, and have always “combined engagement with strategies to counterbalance China through alliances, trade agreements, and military power.” In other words, far from being disastrously pathetic failures, America’s pre-Trump China policies were actually as successful as was humanly possible,  And current leaders should emulate some of their principal choices. 

Even the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, they continue, which faced a China whose wealth and power had begun growing stunningly, had foreseen the possibility of Beijing turning more aggressive, and responded to warning signs exactly as events prescribed. Further, their decisions to stay on an engagement track as well were entirely shrewd and responsible. After all, major potential benefits could still plausibly be expected – because during those years, “the question of how China would use its growing power was open to shaping.”

Indeed, say authors Michael Green (a former Bush-ie) and Paul Haenle (previously both a Bush-ie and Obama-naut), a harder line at that time would have amounted to a policy of “strangling China” that also would have been opposed by major allies and the American people, “both of whom mainly saw China as a partner [and] would not have supported containment and decoupling.“

All that went wrong was that that darned current Chinese dictator Xi Jinping assumed power and, well, just ruined everything with his belligerently expansionist aims and actions, and his reversal of much Chinese economic liberalization. The 2008-09 financial crisis didn’t help, either, according to Geen and Haenle, because it convinced Beijing that “the West was declining and the East is rising.”

All the same, say Green and Haenle, the Biden administration should

>recognize that the two immediate pre-Trump presidents had the security side of China policy fundamentally right with their strategy of maintaining and strengthening U.S. alliances with major Asian countries (an odd recommendation since that’s what Mr. Biden is already trying to do); and

>on the economic side, “reconstruct some of the economic statecraft that underpinned U.S. strategies toward China in the past” – principally reviving the World Trade Organization (WTO) as “an important tool to hold China to account” for its predatory practices and joining the current version of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which can “bring the weight of almost two-thirds of the world economy to the table in demanding reciprocal agreements from China” and “force Beijing to play by the rules or lose hundreds of billions of dollars in trade as tariffs and market barriers among the rule-abiding economies went down.”

But these arguments only strengthen the case that Green, Haenle and their ilk should be kept as far away as possible from U.S. policymaking toward China.

Regarding security issues, their contention that Bush-Obama hedging was responsible and understandable ignores all the ways in which China had been undercutting U.S. national security interests long before the Age of Xi began in 2012. For example, it played a key role in creating Iran’s nuclear weapons program starting in the mid-1980s. It’s been a major supporter of North Korea’s economy – and therefore an enabler of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons development for decades. And it’s beefed up its military presence in the South China Sea – including island grabs that violate international law – for nearly as long.

And Green and Haenle seem to need some improved calendar-reading skills, as financial crisis-borne hubris to which they attribute much of Beijing’s recent bellicosity dates from 2008-09 – three to four years before Xi became China’s top leader. Against this backdrop, it’s glaringly obvious that, judged by actual results, the various hedging statements and even counter-measures mentioned by Green and Haenle counted for exactly squadoosh.

In addition, there’s compelling evidence that the Chinese thought so, too. As I reported in 2018, a former U.S. Chief of Naval Operations (the Navy’s senior-most officer) has stated that his Chinese counterpart told him that “he thought the United States would have a more forceful reaction when China began” one of its key island-building phases during the former’s tenure – during the Obama years.

P.S. – this behavior doesn’t exactly jibe with the notion that Beijing was blown away by Bush-Obama alliance-rallying, either.    

If anything, the Bush and Obama China economic policies were worse, at least in terms of long-run security impact. Both presided virtually passively as

>China’s economic predation helped produce trade surpluses that put literally trillions of dollars at Beijing’s disposal to devote to its military buildup and prevent any guns versus butter tensions from emerging;

>China stole intellectual property seemingly at will, which supercharged weapons development, too; and

>U.S. multinational companies felt perfectly free to transfer cutting-edge defense-relevant technology to Chinese partners that were first and foremost agents of the Chinese state, and to teach perhaps hundreds of thousands of Chinese employees and students how to use this knowhow – and ultimately how to develop more on their own.

As for the authors’ economic recommendations, they’re simply laughable. The TPP, after all, contained a wide-open back door through which goods with lots of Chinese content could enter the proposed free trade – largely because none of the other TPP signatories wanted to disrupt production chains in which China plays a key role.

Meanwhile, that robust China-Asia/Pacific trade and investment, plus the difficulty that Mr. Biden has run into in mobilizing support outside Europe against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is telling all but the willfully deaf that the United States will suddenly become able to increase the WTO’s effectiveness against China’s mercantilism. 

As Green and Haenle suggest, being able to learn from both mistakes and successes is one of life’s most valuable skills.  Sadly, all that their article demontrates is either that they can’t tell the difference, or that they stubbornly refuse to.

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Following Up: National Radio Podcast of China Decoupling Interview Now On-Line

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allies, CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor, China, decoupling, Following Up, Gordon G. Chang, investment, national security, resilience, supply chain, Trade

I’m pleased to announce that the podcast of my interview last night on John Batchelor’s nationally syndicated radio show is now on-line.

Click here for a timely discussion – with co-host Gordon G. Chang – on how quickly (or not) the United States and its major allies are moving toward their stated goal of reducing their economic dependency on China.

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

Im-Politic: How to Deal with TikTok

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censorship, China, Constitution, First Amendment, freedom of speech, Im-Politic, national security, privacy, social media, spying, TikTok

Extra! Extra! I think I’ve come up with solutions to a major China-related conundrum facing U.S. policymakers: How to prevent the wildly popular social media app TikTok from endangering America’s national security and the privacy of individual Americans (often with ominous national security implications) without violating Constitutional protections for speech.

Actually, it’s several solutions. First, it’s vital to remember that

>TikTok – like all entities in China – is ultimately an agent of the Chinese regime;

>it’s already been caught spying on American journalists and sending the information back to China; and

>it’s also already been caught engaging in news and information (including censorship) practices that serve Beijing’s interests. (For evidence for these last two claims, see links in this post from a pundit who’s by no means a China hawk.)

That’s why President Biden banned its presence on federal government-issued devices, and why no one has raised any First Amendment objections. The federal government clearly has the right even in peacetime to ensure that its workforce does nothing to expose itself to blackmail to foreign counterparts or transmit (however innocently) material that could serve foreign government interests. It’s doubly important to put these protections in place before U.S.-China security-related tensions rise further, and certainly before the two countries come to blows over Taiwan or some other dispute.

But this TikTok ban needs to be broadened to include all devices used by U.S. government employees even in private capacities, and to all devices used in any capacity by federal contractors and their employees. After all, no one has a right to work for or to do business with Washington. Those who wish to continue using TikTok would be entirely free to do so, but would need to find jobs and business elsewhere. Any security- and privacy-minded American state or municipal government should be entitled to take the same steps.

As for the use of TikTok in other capacities by private citizens, this entity should be required to run on the app a continuous crawl text stating that it’s a Chinese dictatorship controlled entity; that it’s passed sensitive and possibly compromising personal information to that government, and that the information it makes available is regularly skewed to reflect Beijing’s views and further its objectives. It seems reasonable that these caveats would persuade any thinking adult to switch to other platforms for their entertainment and whatever else they use TikTok for, and begin sharply curbing or at least monitoring their kids’ usage.

I’ve already recommended that all other foreign government materials that can be accessed in the United States be clearly and continuously (in the case of broadcasts or internet content) labeled as such, and these mandatory warnings can be tailored to suit the foreign government in question. (E.g., materials from allied governments would be less detailed than those from China or North Korea or Iran – or Russia.)

But if you’re not satisfied with these measures, here’s another way to justify banning TikTok from the U.S. market in one fell swoop: Authorizing the President to kick out any government-owned or related media or social media entity from any country that has displayed a pattern of endangering U.S. military forces

This way, not only can China be dealt with in a fashion consistent with the First Amendment before the outbreak of a full-scale shooting conflict that would obviously require censoring enemy-state material (its pilots have buzzed U.S. military aircraft flying over international waters several times), but also rogue states like Iran (see, e.g., here) and Russia (see, e.g., here). After all, why give demonstrably hostile foreign regimes any access to what Americans hear and see even if an official state of war doesn’t yet exist? 

Champions of civil liberties (and I count myself as one) are right to worry about government abusing all manner of actual and proposed   national security-related curbs on Americans’ freedoms.  But the above ideas contain plenty of highly specific guard rails based on concrete,  measurable criteria.  TikTok and China have already met every single one of these tests for all of the above limitations, and indeed that set by the  “U.S. forces” yardstick.  In fact, the case against them, based on these commonsensical standards, is so overwhelming that any reasonable person has to wonder why authorized TikTok use still remains so widespread.     

Making News: Back on National Radio Examining the U.S.’ China Containment Strategy

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Asia, CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor, Central America, China, decoupling, DR-CAFTA, friend-shoring, Gordon G. Chang, Immigration, Latin America, Making News, manufacturing, Mexico, NAFTA, national security, North American Free Trade Agreement, tariffs, Trade, U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, USMCA

I’m pleased to announce that I’m scheduled to be back tonight on the nationally syndicated “CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor.” Our subject – whether the trade and security elements of America’s strategy for countering the China threat are too often tripping over each other.

No specific air time had been set when the segment was recorded this morning. But the show – also featuring co-host Gordon G. Chang – is broadcast beginning at 10 PM EST, the entire program is always compelling, and you can listen live at links like this. As always, moreover, I’ll post a link to the podcast as soon as one’s available.

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

Following Up: Podcast On-Line of Last Night’s National Radio Interview on China’s Spy Campaign

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CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor, China, decoupling, espionage, Following Up, Gordon G. Chang, manufacturing, national security, spying

I’m pleased to announce that the podcast is now available of my appearance last night on the nationally syndicated “CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor.” Click here for a timely discussion – with co-host Gordon G. Chang – on why the unsually wide-ranging nature of China’s spying on the United States means that U.S. leaders need to update their dangerously outmoded concepts of critical industries.

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

Making News: On National Radio Tonight on Lagging U.S. Responses to China’s Spying

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CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor, China, decoupling, economy, espionage, Gordon G. Chang, Making News, manufacturing, national security, spying

I’m pleased to announce that I’m scheduled to be back tonight to the nationally syndicated “CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor.” Our subject – why the unsually wide-ranging nature of China’s spying on the United States means that U.S. leaders need to update their dangerously outmoded concepts of industries that are critical for national security.

No specific air time had been set when the segment was recorded this morning, but the show – also featuring co-host Gordon G. Chang – is broadcast beginning at 10 PM EST, the entire program is always compelling, and you can listen live at links like this. As always, moreover, I’ll post a link to the podcast as soon as one’s available.

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

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: A Welcome Biden Breakthrough on China Tech Policy Coming?

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China, export controls, investment, Michael McCaul, monitoring and enforcement, national security, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Politico, tech, The Wall Street Journal

A key Republican in Congress recently said that the Biden administration is seriously considering a major and long overdue escalation of its efforts to hamstring a Chinese drive to achieve global technology dominance that gravely threatens U.S. national security. And a recent Wall Street Journal investigation has shown exactly why it’s so overdue.

Last week, Michael McCaul, Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Politico that (in reporter Gavin Bade’s words) “The White House is considering new action to block U.S. business with entire swaths of the Chinese tech economy — an investment blockade stricter than previously reported.

As McCaul himself put it, based on conversations he says he’s had with U.S. officials, the administration “is talking about a theory where they would stop capital flows into sectors of the economy like AI [artificial intelligence], quantum, cyber, 5G, and, of course, advanced semiconductors — all those things….They actually want to say, right, you can’t invest in any [Chinese] company that does AI. You can’t invest in any company does cyber” or other similar sectors.”

As I’ve repeatedly suggested, such broad brush measures are vital for two main and closely related reasons. First, there are no Chinese entities (even those laughably classified as “private sector”) in any industry, including tech, that aren’t ultimately under the control of the Chinese government.

So it’s been utterly and dangerously foolhardy to believe – as U.S. administrations long have – that not just capital but knowhow and high tech products that Washington permits to be sent to specific Chinese entities aren’t likely to be made available to or used to benefit any other organization in China. And that includes the government and of course the military.

It’s true that Washington’s national security export control system isn’t totally unaware that such leakage may occur. Therefore, for instance, tech and product transfer requests with clear national security implications are typically approved only for customers that supposedly can be trusted to comply. Efforts to verify their trustworthiness are made as well.

But here we come to the second main reason that much more sweeping bans on doing tech business with China are needed: enforcement is excrutiatingly difficult at best. After all, the Chinese tech sector is enormous, which means that the financial and human resources needed for adequate monitoring would be equally enormous. Even worse, the highly secretive Chinese system boasts an impressive arsenal of tactics aimed evading the controls, and the aforementioned Wall Street Journal article indicates how spectacularly they can succeed.

A Journal investigation has found that “China’s top nuclear-weapons research institute has bought sophisticated U.S. computer chips at least a dozen times in the past two and a half years, circumventing decades-old American export restrictions meant to curb such sales.”

Indeed, because of its nuclear weapons-related work, this institute was one of the first such organizations put on U.S. export control blacklists – and that was back in 1997. So it’s clearly long been the subject of great ostensible American concern. Moreover, in 2020, in order to shrink the opportunities for cheating by the lab, the Trump administration  added “10 entities owned or operated by the academy as well as 17 aliases it uses to the entity list for procuring U.S.-origin items in support of Chinese nuclear-weapon activities.”

How, then, did it manage to obtain these semiconductors? Because in a system like China’s, which is not only highly secretive but totally lacking in independent regulatory systems and even apolitical rule of law, nothing is easier than concocting endless numbers of “aliases” and shell companies and fake arrangements of all kinds. Good luck to any American inspectors trying to keep up. Which is why total U.S. bans on investing in entire Chinese tech sectors would be so welcome.

At the same time, why stop at investment? Similar bans on broad classes of products and tech licensing deals are essential, too – and for exactly the same reasons. China operates nothing less than a vast, government wide mechanism for obtaining advanced tech capabilities from abroad by hook or by crook. Concentrating U.S. countermeasures on specific institutes or entities that can quickly change their identities is simply a fool’s quest. With the widest possible bans, Washington could reap the gains of an approach that’s the secret of success in much of life both inside and outside policymaking: keeping it simple.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Now Biden’s Gone America First on the World Trade Organization

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America First, Biden administration, GATT, General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, globalism, international law, national security, sovereignty, Trade, Trump administration, World Trade Organization, WTO, {What's Left of) Our Economy

If someone told you that the U.S. government has outsourced to an international organization the legal authority to decide when American national security is endangered – and inevitably how it can respond – you’d probably think they were pretty out there, or shamelessly lying.

Except that’s exactly what happened in 1947, when globalist U.S. leaders agreed to the body of rules aimed at governing international trade in the post-World War II world, and what remained the case for decades afterward. And although last week, the Biden administration moved decisively to restore sanity to U.S. trade policy in this respect, it didn’t make the complete policy about face that’s still needed.

Since protecting a country’s security is by far the Number One responsibility of any national government, such governments need to be the supreme deciders of how to carry out this mission on an ongoing basis. Further, the legitimacy of this authority logically goes double when democratic national governments like the United States’ are concerned. Why should any other power or organization hold any ability to veto or even influence choices made by the American people’s duly elected representatives to ensure their system’s safety, much less survival? Indeed, on what valid basis could such an ability actually exist? The kindness of strangers? Their superior wisdom?

These maxims are so self-evident (as America’s Declaration of Independence might put it), that even the main body of international law (a system not known for its pragmatism) recognizes them as fundamental attributes of a country’s sovereignty – its bedrock right to take whatever steps it considers needed to keep itself in existence. And how can this security be maintained if its leaders lack the unfettered ability to figure out when threats are present and what they consist of, and if they constantly need to be worrying about is whether the policies they choose pass international muster or not?

But the crucial importance of national sovereignty wasn’t so self-evident to American leaders in World War II’s aftermath. For in the bylaws of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) – the global trade regime that was turned into the World Trade Organization (WTO) at the beginning of 1995 – they agreed to an article that safeguarded a member state’s right to take “any action [to restrict trade] which it considers necessary for the protection of its essential security interests.” Crucially, however, this same Article XXI then proceeded to set out three criteria that such actions needed to meet in order to pass the legality test – including the specification that trade restrictions take place “in time of war or other emergency in international relations.”

These U.S. leaders might have had some decent excuses. First, this was an age when the United States bestrode the world like a titan. How could it be plausibly threatened by mere words on paper? Further, countries outside the Communist camp (none inside signed onto the new trade pact until the mid-1960s) were hardly likely to want to tie America’s military hands since most relied so heavily on U.S. protection.

Second, the GATT lacked effective procedures for enforcing its rules. And third, Washington has always assumed that the Article XXI’s reference to actions that members “consider necessary” means that the entire measure (including the insistence that trade restrictions are legal only in certain types of international conditions) is “self-judging” – i.e., that members’ have the final say over whether it can both define its security interests and the situations in which they can be invoked to override the GATT/WTO’s ban on trade curbs.

But however understandable the U.S. position might have been in 1947, dramatic changes in national and global circumstances over decades should have alerted Washington long ago that Article XXI was bound to cause trouble. Chiefly, America’s predominant global military and economic role inevitably eroded. Many of its allies became formidable economic competitors. The line between military goods and civilian goods – never completely clear – became thoroughly blurred as products incorporating “dual use” technologies proliferated. And the birth of the WTO gave the world trade system a much more effective enforcement system.

Here it’s important to be really specific. It’s not that the WTO can muster a police force, march into the District of Columbia, and compel U.S. officials to follow its dictates. The effectiveness of this dispute resolution system is based on its authority to permit countries claiming to be harmed by U.S. (or any members’) trade practices to respond with retaliatory tariffs – which can be strategically targeted on the kinds of domestic industries powerful enough to launch lobbying campaigns able to force their governments into compliance.

So it’s easy to see why many WTO members – most of which rely heavily on net exporting to the U.S. market to achieve satisfactory levels of growth and employment) would want to use Article XXI to undercut American sovereignty in order to gain advantages for their own industries – including allies who had learned that the United States would continue protecting them and tolerating their defense free-riding even after serious provocations.

Earlier this month, this gambit paid off in spades, as the WTO declared illegal the U.S. tariffs avowedly imposed on steel and aluminum imports for national security reasons by former President Trump in spring, 2018.

Fortunately, in reality, none of the plaintiff countries can legally counter-tariff these U.S. curbs – because that same former President Trump effectively neutered the WTO dispute-resolution system by leaving seats on its appeals panels empty and preventing that body from convening to handle any next legal steps. And to his credit, President Biden has declined to appoint replacements as well.

Also to its credit, though, his administration “strongly rejected” these WTO rulings, and declared that “The United States has held the clear and unequivocal position, for over 70 years, that issues of national security cannot be reviewed in WTO dispute settlement and the WTO has no authority to second-guess the ability of a WTO Member to respond to a wide-range of threats to its security….The United States will not cede decision-making over its essential security to WTO panels.”

Unfortunately, the Biden administration didn’t take this position when it should have – once these foreign suits were filed to begin with. In fact, the administration not only (weirdly) agreed that the WTO does have jurisdiction when national security concerns come into play, but only in the sense that it was required to approve of members’ freedom to invoke these considerations to justify trade barriers. It also went to ridiculous lengths to defend the U.S. position as if WTO members were not able to self-judge their national security claims – to the point of trying to show grammatically that the plaintiffs were misreading Article XXI grammatically.

Think I’m kidding? Here’s how the one of the WTO reports presenting the anti-U.S. ruling described the U.S. effort, including direct quotes from the American brief:

“A premise of the United States’ characterization of Article XXI (b) as ‘self-judging’ is that, based on ‘the text and grammatical structure’ of the provision, ‘the phrase ‘which it considers’ qualifies all of the terms in the single relative clause that follows the word ‘action’. According to the United States, this ‘single relative clause’ in Article XXI(b) ‘begins with ‘which it considers necessary’ and ends at the end of each subparagraph’ and ‘describes the situation which the Member ‘considers’ to be present when it takes such ‘action’. The United States argues from this premise that, ‘[b]ecause the relative clause describing the action begins with ‘which it considers’, the other elements of this clause are committed to the judgment of the Member taking the action.’ The United States thus posits an ‘overall grammatical structure’ of Article XXI(b) according to which a panel may not ‘determine, for itself, whether a security interest is ‘essential’ to the Member in question, or whether the circumstances described in one of the subparagraphs exists'”.

For their part, the plaintiff countries, along with the WTO tribunals, dredged up copies of The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Strunk and White’s classic The Elements of Style, and Merriam-Webster’s Guide to Punctuation and Style, among other such sources, to undercut such claims.

But even though the plaintiffs’ complaints are stuck in international legal limbo, the U.S. decision to legitimize and play this game has resulted in an international organization still proclaiming, without challenge, its absolute right to tell American leaders when they are or are not in a war (dictionary definitions are used as the ultimate standard), and even when they or any part of their national economy do and do not face an “international emergency” (a decision the panel specifically arrogates to WTO judges).

Dispositive substantive arguments can be raised against all the WTO tribunals’ conclusions. For example, as stated above, ensuring a nation’s security adequately is a challenge that doesn’t only arise during especially fraught times in international politics. It typically requires steps taken during more tranquil periods to ensure that military capabilities are adequate the moment trouble starts. WTO rules that prevent these measures from being taken until crises break out could simply ensure that they’re not in effect in time for the United States to prevail.

Yet making these points amounts to falling into the same trap into which the Biden administration’s trade litigators ensnared themselves and the country. Instead, Washington should both make emphatically clear that once U.S. authorities justify a trade-restricting measure, the WTO is irrelevant (as the Biden administration eventually declared) and then boycott whatever proceedings are convened.

Plaintiff countries would still be free to try to address these problems either through standard bilateral diplomacy, or counter-measures of their own, or some combination of the two, and let the party with the most leverage come out on top. Trade purists dismiss these practices as descending into a dangerous economic “law of the jungle,” but the United States and the European Union resorted to just this approach to resolve a long dispute about aircraft production subsidies outside WTO auspices. And freed of the cumbersome and inflexible adversarial framework imposed by the trade body’s legalistic procedures, they reached an agreement that satisfied all major stakeholders – including U.S. unions.

Handling these disputes bilaterally will strongly tend to produce lasting results and work in the U.S.’ favor because (a) agreements will reflect real world power balances – not the rulings of a system whose only raison d’etre is to define power out of existence in favor of an abstract equitism that’s completely divorced from global circumstances on the ground – and (b) because the United States enjoys an abundance of such power.

That the globalist Biden administration is acting as willing as the America First-y Trump administration to recognize that, at least when it comes to national security, tinternational trade law is “an idiot” (to quote Dickens) signals an encouragingly fundamental turn in America’s approach to the global economy. Even better would be for the President to make the break as clean and unmistakable as possible.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: A Republican Strategy Guru Who Ain’t

Tags

China, Marc A. Thiessen, Mike Gallagher, national security, neoconservatives, North Atlantic treaty Organization, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, priorities, Republicans, Russia, semiconductors, strategy, Taiwan, Ukraine, Ukraine War

Neoconservative pundit Marc A. Thiessen has just written that neconservative Congressman Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin is the type of Republican who he thinks should “guide the Republican Party into the next era and shape conservative public policy, from national security to health to education to the economy.”

I’m far from convinced, especially on the national security front that’s the focus of this column, since Gallagher’s expressed views seem like a formula for exactly the kind of global over-extension that’s backfired so disastrously on America in the past (Google “Vietnam” or “Middle East.”)

This Wisconsin Republican’s main problem is one that’s dogged not only neocons and their constant exhortations for the United States to play or resume playing globocop indefinitely, but many other American leaders, including those on the Left – who favor similarly open-ended U.S. involvement in all manner of foreign crises and problems but either on the cheap, or with all manner of aesthetically and morally pleasing substitutes for military power, or coercion of any kind.

It’s a failure or an refusal to base American strategy and security and prosperity on the only basis practical even for a superpower – as an effort to (a) secure or defend goals that will promote U.S. interests on net in specific, concrete ways –  like protecting countries or regions with important locations, or that possess needed resources; and (b) propose feasible approaches to generate the wherewithal needed to achieve those goals.

Put simply, a successful U.S. foreign policy needs to set priorities of some kind, and in an interview with Thiessen, Gallagher explicitly rejected these premises, at least when it comes to two current headline overseas challenges.

According to Gallagher,

“[T]his idea that, ‘Well, we can be tough on China, but we have to strike some grand bargain with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin in Europe because our resources are limited.’ I just think that reflects a naive view of the way the world is working right now.”

He did explain that

“for those of us who want to continue to support the Ukrainians and deliver a massive loss to the Russians … we have to do a better job of tying the threat posed by Russia to the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party. And it’s really teasing out the fact that for at least a decade, if not longer, these countries, who at times have interests that diverged and at times were outright hostile, at least in the present day, have locked arms to wage a new Cold War against the West….”  

As for “the ultimate aim of China in particular”? That’s “to destroy the capitalist system led by the United States and make way for the ultimate triumph of world socialism with, you know, Chinese characteristics.”

I have no quarrel with Gallagher’s assumption of deep and dangerous Chinese hostility to the United States. And he has, in my view correctly and cogently, identifed several branches of China’s strategy that seek to weaken America from within, like propaganda spreading (which – I assume – he understands requires strong, overwhelmingly domestic policy responses).

But the other stuff – if you think about it logically, it simply doesn’t matter. That is, whether or not the Chinese and Russians are in cahoots, and however sweepin their aims, because different countries’ and regions’ importance to the United States varies dramatically (since they’re all so different in their characteristics), it’s inevitable that some of the targets of this “new [joint] Cold War” that they’re supposedly waging will significantly affect America’s fortunes, and some won’t.

And what Gallagher doesn’t come to terms with is 

>(a) all the evidence cited by opponents of current U.S. Ukraine policy (like me), that Ukraine’s fate is irrelevant to America for reasons ranging from its tragic location right next to Russia and its lack of any assets needed by America to the continued refusal of the United States and its allies to admit it into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (which implicitly acknowledges Ukraine’s  marginality); and

>(b) all the evidence that Taiwan is of vital importance – because of its matchless ability to manufacture the advanced semiconductors that are keys to ongoing U.S. security and prosperity, and therefore to America’s ability to keep fending off Chinese ambitions to control the island and this knowhow.

In Gallagher’s defense, he’s a strong proponent of the much bigger defense budgets that the United States would need to field the forces and weapons needed to resist both Russia’s Ukraine aims and China’s Taiwan aims.

But that higher spending will take many years to shore up American battlefield capabilities further, and Gallagher himself believes that the United States can’t defend Taiwan now, and doesn’t foresee success for another five years.

Worse, in the meantime, it’s being reported, including by a bipartisan Congressional commission, that “[t]he diversion of existing stocks of weapons and munitions to Ukraine and pandemic-related supply chain issues has exacerbated a sizeable backlog in the delivery of weapons already approved for sale to Taiwan, undermining the island’s readiness.”

So current American priorities could well be exactly backwards, and even if not, contrary to Gallagher’s blithe prior assertion, American resources are now in fact severely limited.

To top if all off, Gallagher also told Thiessen that by 2025 (if the Chinese haven’t already invaded), the President then should declare that “defending Taiwan [is] our most urgent national security priority….” But what about Ukraine? By then it’ll be No Big Deal? Or it’s safe to assume that conflict will be over? Nothing from Gallagher on that. But he did add that “by the way, I don’t think [keeping Taiwan secure] would cost that much money.”

Thiessen introduced Gallagher as someone who “has a bachelor’s degree from Princeton, a master’s degree in security studies from Georgetown University, a second master’s in strategic intelligence from the National Intelligence University and a PhD in international relations from Georgetown — all of which mean he’s deeply overqualified for any national security position.”

To me, what he’s really done is unwittingly reveal some of the institutions you want to avoid like the plague if you hope to develop a U.S. foreign policy strategy worthy of the name.

Making News: Back on National Radio on Banning TikTok & Other Decoupling from China

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Byte Dance, CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor, China, decoupling, export controls, Gordon G. Chang, Making News, national security, privacy, semiconductor manufacturing equipment, semiconductors, social media, tech, TikTok

I’m pleased to announce that I’m scheduled to be back tonight to the nationally syndicated “CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor.” Our subject – a raft of recent and proposed U.S. government moves to decouple the nation’s economy from China’s, including legislation to ban the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok.

The segment, which also features co-host Gordon G. Chang, is slated to be broadcast at 10 PM EST. But the entire program is always compelling, and you can listen live at links like this. As always, moreover, I’ll post a link to the podcast as soon as one’s available.

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