Our So-Called Foreign Policy: America’s Asian Alliances Have Become More Dangerous Than Ever

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alliances, allies, Asia, China, deterrence, Japan, North Korea, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, South Korea, tripwire

With all the uproar generated, at least among globalist foreign policy professionals, by President Trump’s various verbal attacks on America’s alliance arrangements, it’s easy to forget their most important purpose. It’s not to protect allies for their own sakes, much less to “uphold the liberal global order” or to “promote American values”  or to “preserve international stability.” 

Their most important purpose is to increase via the use of the allies’ military forces the odds that if a conflict breaks out in a particular neighborhood deemed crucial to America’s own interests, that the United States will prevail. The other aforementioned objectives can of course line up with this overriding military objective, and they can of course result from its attainment. But the alliances’ fundamental raison d’etre is to help the United States on the battlefield in a region whose freedom from foreign domination is considered crucial to America’s own security and/or prosperity.

Further, this military assistance once the shooting starts matters a lot because such support can go far toward preventing these regional conflicts from triggering the use of nuclear weapons, and thereby preventing possible nuclear attacks on American territory.

All of which is why recent trade tensions between Japan and South Korea – America’s two leading allies in East Asia – should be of such urgent concern. For the feud, which has just prompted South Korea to pull out of a military intelligence sharing agreement it had recently reached with Japan, could not be a clearer sign that none of Washington’s longstanding assumptions about such crucial military support from these two countries remains valid – if they ever were – and that these arrangements are now not only outdated, but dangerously outdated.

For the quarrel’s outbreak and intensification represent the most important evidence to date that both Japan and South Korea care little about providing such support in an effective way – which unavoidably requires them to work together. How can they cooperate, and thereby effectively reinforce U.S. military operations, if they literally won’t even talk to each other about current or emerging battlefield conditions and threats?

And if Japanese and South Korean assistance will remain marginal at best (a conclusion supported by the relatively modest size and capabilities of their own forces, which have long been unable to repulse regional aggression without American assistance, despite the huge size of their economies) then the odds of keeping any regional conflict non-nuclear – and keeping the U.S. homeland safe from North Korean or Chinese nuclear attack – become unacceptably low for the United States.

At one time, the United States could have eased this dilemma satisfactorily by spending still more money on conventional forces for the defense of countries that are alarmingly blasé about defending themselves – however dubious this option is on military grounds alone. (For how promising are efforts to protect countries that are so determined to avoid risks and costs?)

But because of the emergence and improvement of the nuclear forces of North Korea and China, respectively, even that option will no longer squares the circle adequately.  Which means that the alliances (including in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization – NATO – on the other side of the world) have reached the point of becoming net threats to U.S. national security, not net boosters.

Worst of all is American policy on the Korean peninsula.  It remains unchanged  from the days when North Korea arguably could be deterred by threatened U.S. nuclear weapons use from attacking with its own superior conventional forces because it lacked nuclear retaliatory capability.  As a result, it continues to station nearly 30,000 American troops right near the border of the aggressive and volatile North for the express purpose of creating a “trip wire.”  In other words, North Korea might now be able to destroy U.S. cities with its own nuclear bombs, or soon might be able to in response to American nuclear use. But Washington still recklessly seeks to prevent any such attack by the North in the first place by placing these troops in imminent danger and leaving nuclear use the only realistic option of saving them if hostilities ever did break out.  

If a standard globalist President was occupying the Oval Office, it would be understandable that he or she would be responding to the Japan-South Korea feud and its alliance implications by wishing it away. But Donald Trump is an avowed America First President – and has demonstrated many instincts along these lines. Why is he waiting to long to take this latest, massive hint, and leave these increasingly unreliable countries to their own (considerable) devices?

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Globalist Blob Wants the U.S. to Keep Looking for Trouble

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alliances, Blob, China, Council on Foreign Relations, East Asia-Pacific, extended deterrence, globalism, Japan, North Korea, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Project-Syndicate.org, Richard N. Haass, South Korea, Taiwan, Trump

I’d like to offer a deal to anyone in America’s bipartisan globalist foreign policy establishment: You come up with defenses of the pre-Trump strategies and approaches you support that aren’t transparently ridiculous, and I’ll start portraying them as something other than sick jokes.

Judging by Richard N. Haass’ latest column for the Project Syndicate website, it’s clear that even if these members of the Blob (a wonderful nickname for this crew of former officials, genuine scholars, think tank creatures, Mainstream Media journalists, and business and finance leaders) cared about what I think, they’d flunk this test.

Haass is an especially important Blob-er because he not only served as a top policymaker under three Republican presidents (and in a more junior position during Jimmy Carter’s administration). He’s the President of the Council on Foreign Relations – the Blob’s oldest and most prominent think tank. (Truth in advertising: He also preceded me by two years at our Long Island, N.Y high school, but we had no personal dealings.)

But we should all hope that the advice he dispensed in government was much better than that he seems to have offered in “Asia’s Scary Movie.” Because his arguably underlying message – that the United States should reinforce its commitment to militarily defending the East Asia-Pacific region even though the region shows signs of fracturing on the economic and security fronts – is nothing less than a recipe for increasing America’s exposures to perils it can’t possibly control.

Especially and dangerously nutty is Haass’ clear belief that the United States should maintain its security relationships with Japan and South Korea even though the two countries are engaged in a literal trade war that’s disrupting interactions between their two gigantic clusters of information technology hardware manufacturing – which are so big that global trade and production in these critical sectors could take a major hit if the feud escalates further.

After all, as noted in that post linked just above, American ties with these two countries are “vital to its aims of balancing China and addressing the threat from North Korea” – both of which threats Haass correctly describes as growing and as worrisome as ever, respectively. In other words, in the event of trouble that may require a military response, the United States is relying on help from Tokyo and Seoul – which, in turn, are going to need to be working together.

But military relations between these two Asian countries have long been threadbare at best. Worse, their latest dispute – amid the backdrop of the rising China challenge and the ongoing peril from North Korea, which endanger both – has broken out because of grievances and grudges dating from Japan’s long and brutal occupation of the entire Korean peninsula in the decades preceding the end of World War II.

Given the history, it’s easy to understand why there’s no love lost between these two peoples. But alliances make sense only when the participants can count on each other for effective assistance if and when the shooting starts. Can anyone seriously believe that Japan and South Korea are going to get their act together suddenly if North Korean forces barrel across the Demilitarized Zone, or if Beijing moves against Taiwan? Or that responsible American defense planning should assume this rosy scenario?

Even worse, if trouble does break out on the Korean peninsula, nearly 30,000 American troops will be right in the middle. As I’ve written repeatedly, their vulnerability to superior North Korean conventional forces means that a U.S. President might need to use nuclear weapons to save them. For many years, North Korea’s inability to hit the American homeland with its own nukes made this threat (known as “extended deterrence”) credible and helped keep the peace. Given the North’s major progress toward precisely this capability, the current U.S. strategy could soon amount to risking the complete destruction of a big American city – or two. That may even be the case now.

In other words, given all these major, worsening Asia problems, the logical U.S. response is not stubbornly staying seated atop a powder keg. It’s to disengage ASAP. But any disengagement is such anathema to Haass and the rest of the Blob that he’s actually portrayed President Trump’s various statements criticizing the wisdom of America’s alliances as major contributors to East Asia’s stability.

Ironically, though, despite the Blob’s complaints, Mr. Trump’s biggest mistake along these lines clearly has been to continue his predecessors’ alliance policies, and even to double down in Eastern Europe – a region that could be as dangerous as East Asia.

That is, Haass and the rest of the Blob should be resting a lot easier. What a tragedy that there’s no reason to say that for the rest of us.

Making News: Two New TV Interviews on Video…& More!

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Breitbart.com, China, i24News, John Carney, Kim Jong Un, Liquid Lunch, Making News, manufacturing, Newsmax TV, North Korea, Trade, trade war, Trump, Xi JInPing

I’m pleased to announce that two new videos of recent interviews are now on-line.

The first is the recording of my aforementioned appearance on Newsmax TV‘s Liquid Lunch program last Friday, and covers the U.S.-China trade conflict and the weekend summit between President Trump and Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.  Here’s the link.

Second, I appeared again last night on i24News to analyze both the Trump-Xi trade truce, and Mr. Trump’s historic visit to North Korea and meeting with that country’s dictator Kim Jong Un.  Click here, and press the download button to access it.

Finally, John Carney’s review yesterday on Breitbart.com of recent U.S. manufacturing data quoted my views.  Click here to read.

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

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: America’s Foreign Policy Blob Challenged from Within

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alliances, allies, America First, Asia, Blob, burden sharing, Chas W. Freeman, East Asia, East Asia-Pacific, establishment, globalism, Japan, North Korea, nuclear deterrence, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, South Korea, Trade, Trump

Chas [that’s not a typo] W. Freeman isn’t exactly a household name. He’s even far from the most prominent member of the U.S. foreign policy “Blob” – the bipartisan establishment of current government bureaucrats, former officials, think tank-ers, academics, and journalists whose members for decades have both constantly changed exchanged jobs as their particular political patrons have rotated in and out of elected office, and helped keep the nation’s approach to international affairs on a strongly activist, interventionist (i.e., globalist) course for decades.

That is, they’ve succeeded in this mission until Donald Trump’s election as president, and even he hasn’t managed to throw off their grip completely. (See this 2018 article of mine for an explanation of how globalism and the “America First” approach touted by Mr. Trump differ, and examples of how his foreign policy decisions have reflected both strategies so far.)

But Freeman is a card-carrying member of the Blob – as one look at his bio should make clear. And that’s what makes this recent speech of his so interesting and important.

The address, delivered to a world affairs conference in Florida, has attracted the most attention (especially on Twitter) for its critique of President Trump’s China policy. And that makes perfect sense given the Freeman literally was present at the creation of the Nixon-era outreach to the People’s Republic that ended decades of Cold War hostility and set the framework for bilateral relations from the early 1970s until the Trump Era began.

But in my view, the China portions are eminently forgettable – amounting to a standard (but less oft-stated these days) Blob-y claim that the PRC is being scapegoated for chronic failures of U.S. domestic economic and social policy.

What really stands out is this passage – which clashes violently with the Blob’s defining worship of America’s security alliances and dovetails intriguingly, albeit only partially, with my own views of how America’s economic and security strategy toward China and the rest of East Asia should evolve.

According to Freeman (and he’s worth quoting in full):

“President Trump has raised the very pertinent question: Should states with the formidable capabilities longstanding American “allies” now have still be partial wards of the U.S. taxpayer? In terms of our own security, are they assets or liabilities? Another way of putting this is to ask: Do our Cold War allies and their neighbors now face credible threats that they cannot handle by themselves? Do these threats also menace vital U.S. interests? And do they therefore justify U.S. military presences and security guarantees that put American lives at risk? These are questions that discomfit our military-industrial complex and invite severe ankle-biting by what some have called ‘the Blob’ – the partisans of the warfare state now entrenched in Washington. They are serious questions that deserve serious debate. We Americans are not considering them.

“Instead, we have finessed debate by designating both Russia and China as adversaries that must be countered at every turn. This has many political and economic advantages. It is a cure for enemy deprivation syndrome – that queasy feeling our military-industrial complex gets when our enemies disorient us by irresponsibly defaulting on their contest with us and disappearing, as the Soviet Union did three decades ago. China and Russia are also technologically formidable foes that can justify American R&D and procurement of the expensive, high-tech weapons systems. Sadly, low intensity conflict with scruffy ‘terrorist’ guerrillas can’t quite do this.”

If you ignore what I view as the not-very-informative shots against the “warfare state,” you can see that Freeman comes close to exposing some of the main weaknesses and even internal contradictions of both main factions in the national China policy debate, and (unintentionally, but unmistakably) provides some support for the America First set of priorities I’ve proposed.

Specifically, supporters of pre-Trump China trade policies generally have insisted that China and the rest of East Asia are crucial to America’s economic future because of their huge and fast-growing markets and overall dynamism. But although they staunchly back maintaining the U.S. alliances in the East Asia-Pacific region that has long aimed to secure the political independence of its non-communist countries and thereby keep their economies open to American exports and investment, they keep ignoring three major problems created by this approach.

>First, the trade and broader China economic policies they’ve stood for have greatly enriched and strengthened the country posing the greatest threat to East Asian security. (See, e.g., this column.) 

>Second, because of the growth and increasing sophistication of Chinese and North Korean nuclear forces, America’s alliances in the region have brought the U.S. homeland under unprecedented threat of nuclear attack from both of these rivals.

>Third, despite the alliances, countries like Japan and South Korea have remained highly protectionist economies whose trade predation has damaged America’s overall economy and particularly its manufacturing base. In fact, there’s every reason to believe that U.S. security objectives have enabled this allied trade predation, by preventing Washington from retaliating effectively for fear of antagonizing Tokyo and Seoul.

The Trump policy mix strikes me as being much more internally consistent. In large measure because of fears of growing Chinese military might, it’s trying to use both trade and investment policy to curb Beijing’s use of intellectual property theft and technology extortion in particular to gain regional parity with U.S. forces and thus make America’s alliance commitments much more dangerous and costly to fulfill. The administration also deserves credit for recognizing the purely economic damage Asian trade predation has caused America.

But for all the president’s complaints about defense burden-sharing, he, too, appears determined to keep the alliances intact. Hence his recent insistence that South Korea pay more of the costs of the U.S. troop deployments on its soil despite his repeated claims about the alliance’s necessity. Just as important, although the Trump Asia policies have sought more balanced trade flows with regional allies, these very efforts make clear how unsatisfactory these economic relationships have been. As a result, they sandbag the case that the United States must run major military risks to preserve them.

Freeman’s speech suggests support for a different set of priorities. In one sense, they’re logical: If, as he suggests, its security alliances in East Asia are no longer good deals for the United States, then it’s indeed not such a big deal from a security perspective if America’s economic policies toward China are helping Beijing increase its military power – and boost the odds that it will someday control the region to America’s economic detriment.

Yet Freeman’s apparent priorities fail on the purely economic front, as they seem to propose doing nothing whatever to combat the Chinese policies that have harmed America’s economy.

And that’s why the America First recipe I’ve proposed makes the most sense:

>First, disengaging from an increasingly hostile and economically dangerous China (largely because no trade deal can be adequately verified).

>Second, recognizing that trade with the entire East Asian region has been a loser for the United States and certainly not worth the growing military risks to the American homeland – and thereby concluding that the U.S.’ still-overwhelming economic leverage is likeliest to secure whatever improvements in trade and commercial relations are needed.

>Third, wherever possible, using this economic leverage to shift jobs offshored to Asia but not likely to return to the United States (because they’re too labor-intensive and therefore “low tech”) to Mexico and Central America. The resulting new economic opportunities could go far toward solving the Western Hemisphere’s immigration problems.

Unfortunately, because the Trump administration has its Asia priorities so confused, optimism regarding major changes is tough to justify. But Freeman’s willingness to challenge from within the Blob’s fetishization of U.S. alliances, however flawed, is a ray of hope. And who was it who said that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step?

Im-Politic: Shutdown Lessons – So Far

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border security, border wall, China, Congress, Democrats, E-Verify, election 2020, establishment Republicans, government shutdown, illegal alien crime, illegal aliens, Im-Politic, Immigration, Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, North Korea, Paul Ryan, Populism, Russia-Gate, shutdown, Swamp, Trade, Trump

Since the fight isn’t over by a long shot, it’s chancy at best to try to figure out many of the biggest implications of President Trump’s decision to reopen the shut down parts of the federal government despite getting no new funding for a Border Wall or any new physical barriers aimed at strengthening border security. Still, here’s what looks reasonably clear at this stage of the struggle:

>First and foremost, the shutdown situation, context, and therefore even the verdict were set in stone more than two years ago by the Russia collusion/election cheating charges, by the opposition (mainly passive) to President Trump’s immigration agenda of the establishment Republicans still so prominent in Congress (and not just in its leadership) during the Trump administration’s first two years, and the resulting politics of impeachment.

That is, as I’ve written previously, from his first day in office, Mr. Trump needed to secure the protection of Congressional Republicans – including their establishment ranks. Therefore, he needed to prioritize their top issues, like Obamacare repeal and a tax cut heavily weighted toward business, rather than his top – populist – issues, like fixing America’s broken trade and immigration policies.

It’s true that in his second year, the President has ramped up the pressure on leading trade predator China and on other mercantile economies (with his steel and aluminum tariffs). But unlike the Border Wall, those measures didn’t require Congressional funding, or any form of approval from Capitol Hill. (The new trade deal with Mexico and Canada to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement seems to be moderate enough to at least have attracted mild endorsements from the Big Business-run Offshoring Lobby.)

And if establishment Congressional Republican leaders like former House Speaker Paul Ryan and current Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell weren’t going to go the mat for the Wall (which of course would also have required helping to persuade some moderate Democrats to come along as well) when the GOP controlled both houses of Congress, there was absolutely no way Mr. Trump could have generated Wall funding once the Democrats gained control of the House.

Incidentally, it’s being reported by at least one non-anonymous source with first-hand knowledge that the President himself provided some confirmation for this argument – by blaming Ryan for “having ‘screwed him’ by not securing border wall money when Republicans had the majority….”

>If you’re going to shut down the government, and especially if you’re planning to dig in your heels for the duration, shut down the right agencies. For example, if the issues are illegal immigration and law enforcement, don’t shut down the Department of Homeland Security – which is chiefly responsible for protecting the nation’s security in these areas. If you’re a Republican, don’t shut down the Agriculture Department, whose rural constituency is overwhelmingly Republican and conservative, and which was already unhappy enough with the President about China trade policies that had pretty much shut down America’s immense soybean exports to the People’s Republic. Also if you’re a Republican don’t shutdown the Federal Aviation Administration – because victims are especially likely to be businessmen and women and other relatively affluent voters – who provide lots of actual and gettable Republican votes.

>Consequently, the politics of shutdowns, and of some aspects of political populism, are becoming clearer than ever – especially if they’re long ones. And many of these should have been obvious from the start.

Most obvious, voters of all kinds – populists and non-populists alike – who are receptive to anti-government arguments get a lot less anti-government when the affected services affect them directly.

Less obvious, populist voters themselves say and act happy to see populist politicians act like disrupters when it comes to the mutually supportive networks of corruption and propaganda set up by establishment politicians, lobbyists, consultants, think tank hacks, and mainstream media journalists in the Washington, D.C. Swamp The same goes for establishment policies they believe have brought them nothing but trouble, like mass immigration, offshoring-friendly trade deals, and pipe dream foreign wars and similar ventures.

What they don’t want disrupted is the steady stream of government services that make their lives easier – and even viable in the first place.

>For reasons like the above, it’s unimaginable that Mr. Trump will follow through with his threat to shut down the government again if he can’t persuade Democrats to compromise acceptably on Wall funding. His best hope for some kind of partial win is to portray himself as the reasonable party, and the Democrats as the arrogant, rigid extremists.

>In that vein, expect continued, and even more frequent administration activity spotlighting crimes by illegal aliens – especially in the districts and states of key lawmakers. But success is also likely to require claims (which are entirely credible, in my opinion) that illegal aliens steal jobs from native-born Americans and/or drive down their wages, and that the leading victims include minority Americans.

>One particularly effective tactic would be for the administration to push for mandating that businesses use the E-Verify system to prevent illegal aliens out of the national job market. E-Verify is currently being used on a voluntary basis by many companies (not including most Trump-owned companies), and by all accounts is extremely accurate. (That is, it snares virtually no innocents in its electronic net.) But its use so far has been voluntary, meaning that companies that blow it off get legs up on their competition by virtue of easy access to bargain-basement illegal employees.

>Another potentially effective talking point that the administration has strangely ignored: focusing on the sheer numbers of foreigners who’d be likely to swamp U.S. borders – and the country’s asylum system – without more effective physical barriers. The administration and all of its spokespeople and media supporters should keep asking the question of Democrats: How many tens of millions of these would-be immigrants and asylum-seekers can the United States afford to admit?

>If these Trump efforts fail, declaring a national emergency looks like the President’s best bet to reestablish credibility with his base and perhaps with fence-sitting voters and Members of Congress, and even some legislative opponents.

Such a move could also go far toward putting the most politically damaging aspects of this issue behind him. After all, there’s little that opponents can do about such a national emergency declaration other than try to tie it up in the courts. And Mr. Trump could – credibly, in my opinion – respond by using information about illegal aliens crime to accuse them of endangering their countrymen and women’s security. So even if rulings by friendly judges hold up actual Wall construction, Mr. Trump’s political position could benefit.

>The President also could well be tempted to score political points by pressing harder to win some foreign policy victories. A China trade deal and significant progress in limiting the nuclear weapons threat posed by North Korea are the two most obvious candidates, but presidential over-eagerness could seriously undermine major American interests.

I’m most worried about the administration’s dealings with Beijing, given the talk out of China of ending the current trade conflict for the foreseeable future by buying lots more American goods and services. More Chinese imports from the United States would be welcome – no mistake about that. But not if the price is letting Beijing off the hook for its ambitions literally to steal and subsidize its way to global supremacy in key technologies that not so coincidentally have big defense implications.

>Finally, re shutdowns themselves, the policy of requiring furloughed workers to do their jobs without getting paid strikes me as completely unacceptable. In other circumstances like this, at home or abroad, these practices are called “forced labor” or “wage theft.” And they’re rightly condemned. Nearly as bad, these furlough practices help pro-shutdown politicians curry favor with their supporters while mitigating or at least postponing the harm to the public – including those supporters.

In other words, if you’re for a shutdown, make it a real shutdown. For any agency whose funding is cut off, the workers stay home – and the jobs they do don’t get done. If that means chaos ensues and public safety is put at risk, too bad for shutdown-ers. They’ll own it.

>Speaking of owning it, that’s the situation that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi now finds herself in not only regarding border security but every issue that comes up in national affairs. In particular, when you show you’ve gained enough power to win political battles, you also show that you’ve gained enough power to frustrate initiatives that may be unpopular among your caucus in Congress, or some of your caucus, but that may be popular with everyone else. So forget about the the idea that Pelosi is now free to conduct a campaign of all-encompassing resistance to the Trump agenda, and to dictate terms of those proposals that she is willing to consider.

>And finally, that’s one of the many reasons it’s way too early to predict how the shutdown fight will impact the next presidential election. The main additional reasons: There’s still a long ways to go before that campaign achieves critical mass, and any number of events could turn the political calculus upside down. And similarly, it’s glaringly obvious that the Trump era news cycle – along with the national attention span – is already the shortest in recent memory – and could well keep getting shorter.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Fair-Weather U.S. Allies?

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alliances, allies, China, East China Sea, Eastern Europe, France, Germany, globalism, internationalism, Japan, NATO, North Atlantic TYreaty Organization, North Korea, nuclear deterrence, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Pew Research Center, Russia, South Korea, Soviet Union, United Kingdom

Establishment analysts and commentators have looked at the results of the Pew Research Center’s recent survey on overseas attitudes towards U.S. foreign policy under President Trump and decided that their most important findings are that his America First approach is costing America valuable influence on the global stage.

Even if you don’t find those conclusions transparently self-serving – since the vast majority of these analysts and commentators are staunch supporters of a more traditional globalist or internationalist approach – consider this alternative interpretation: The Pew survey strongly suggests that the globalist strategy, which has been in place for decades, has failed miserably in a crucial respect. Even though its core principles have required that the United States accept enormous cost and risks (including nuclear) on behalf of allies all over the world, the Pew researchers have found that even under President Obama – a pretty run-of-the-mill globalist – the populations of these same allies had little appreciation for these American burdens.

For me, the most glaring example is South Korea. As RealityChek readers know, for years I’ve been noting that the rapid recent progress of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program means that the United States’ longstanding commitment to use nuclear weapons if necessary to defend the South from a northern invasion or simply to deter such an attack is now qualitatively more dangerous than in the past. For if North Korea has not already developed the means to launch a nuclear strike that could take out an American city – or two or three – it’s not far from achieving that goal.

The North’s progress was glaringly obvious in 2013, when Pew last asked South Koreans if they believed that “In making international policy decisions, the U.S. takes into account the interest of countries like ours a great deal/fair amount.” Yet that year, only 36 percent of South Koreans answered “Yes.” This year, only 24 percent of South Koreans gave that answer.

Japan is also protected by an American nuclear umbrella – at least in principle. As with the case of South Korea, it hosts large American military forces whose presence aims to bolster the credibility of that promise. And North Korea has actually fired missiles over Japanese territory – meaning that the threat it poses to Japan and to those U.S. forces is anything but merely theoretical. (If only because the American forces in Japan that defend the islands are supposed to help their comrades-in-arms if war breaks out on the Korean peninsula.) Japan is also alarmed by Chinese encroachments in the East China Sea.

But in 2013, only 38 percent of Japanese agreed that American foreign policy takes their interests into account even a fair amount. This year, that number is down to 28 percent.

The security situation in Europe is not nearly as fraught. But Russia has certainly taken actions that arguably threaten the security of new members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that used to be part of either the old Soviet Union or the Soviet bloc. And as NATO allies, these countries are also entitled to nuclear protection from the United States even though their fates had never before been considered vital American interests and even though Russia retains nuclear forces more than large enough to devastate the United States many times over.

Yet although the new NATO members either border Germany (like Poland) or are located pretty close by, and even though Germans presumably would not want to see Russia reestablish dominance, even in 2013, only 50 percent of Germans believed that Washington takes their interests significantly into account in its foreign policy. The 2018 figure? With Russia at least as menacing? Nineteen percent. And the Germans are anything but outliers, as Pew found roughly the same trend in France and in the United Kingdom (although the share of their populations detecting any meaningful American regard for their interests in 2013 was a good deal lower than in Germany – just 35 percent and 40 percent, respectively).

A common retort by globalists and by allies is that allied populations have no reason to be especially grateful to the United States because these alliances serve crucial American interests, too. But what they forget is that populations (especially from countries whose governments have been champion security free-riders) that don’t believe the United States cares much about them aren’t likely to be populations likely to support the American military when push comes to shove in their regions – as opposed to calling for some version of accommodating the aggressors.

Not that I’m criticizing allied populations. At least in their initial stages, any conflicts will take place almost exclusively on their territories. And P.S. – these kinds of strains were troubling alliance relations for decades before Trump. But the by the same token, the Pew results underscore two truths about U.S. alliances that should be disturbing globalists more than ever.

First, the nuclear risks they still appear to be entirely satisfied with are being run for stakes (the security of relatively small, unimportant countries, as opposed to Japan and the entirety of Western Europe) that are less rationally justifiable than ever. And second, when the United States needs to lead the resistance to aggression, it may have fewer followers than ever.

Following Up: Woodward’s Globalist Bias

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Alan Greenspan, Bob Woodward, economists, establishment, Fear, Financial Crisis, Following Up, globalism, Mainstream Media, manufacturing, North Korea, nuclear weapons, Robert Costa, South Korea, steel tariffs, Trade, Trump, Washington Week

I’m a long-time admirer of Bob Woodward, and so it’s disappointing to say the least that he’s just provided more evidence that his sensational (literally) new book Fear is as much of a Hail Mary to restore the (deservedly) shredded reputation of the nation’s bipartisan globalist policy establishment as an effort to portray “the real inside” story of the President Trump’s White House.

At this point, I should confess that I still haven’t read the book. But enough of it had come out through about a week ago that I felt justified in analyzing Woodward’s treatment of Korea-related trade and security issues and arriving at the above conclusion. The new evidence comes from the long-time Washington Post reporter’s interview this past Friday night on PBS’ Washington Week talk show, so it seems as an equally sound basis for judging Woodward’s thinking.

Korea issues again come into play, but so does the President’s recent decision to impose tariffs on most of the foreign steel attempting to enter the U.S. Market. Let’s look at Woodward’s assessment of the steel situation first.

The author’s first problem with the levies is his belief that they represent an instance of Mr. Trump’s alleged habit of “just [doing] what he wants; and he’ll listen up to a point, then he will dismiss….” This disquiet is easily dismissed itself, as it sounds like the President seeks advice from his advisers and then, after a finite period of time, decides what course he’ll take. What does Woodward think Mr. Trump is supposed to do? Listen indefinitely? Or until he’s convinced he’s wrong?

But the Woodward’s second problem with the steel tariffs is much more revealing of his own blinders – and therefore much more disturbing. Here it is:

“Now, if you took a thousand economists and say do steel tariffs make sense – and I quote a document in the book where experts on the left, the right, the economists, Nobel Prize winners, Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, leading Democratic and Republican economists, send him a letter saying don’t do this; this will not work.  And, of course, he does it….

“But now we are in the world of these trade wars, which he says he thinks he can win.  Wow.  Danger, danger.”

In other words, Mr. Trump’s great crime is failing to listen to the supposed experts. I say “supposed” because the two he mentioned specifically – former Federal Reserve Chairs Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke – have little enough claim to minimal competence in their own economic specialty, monetary affairs. The former spearheaded the disastrous monetary and regulatory policies that helped trigger the world’s worst financial crisis and depression in decades. The latter was caught with his pants below his ankles when the crisis struck, and “solved” it by flooding the economy with so much new credit that it was bound to stay afloat. You needed a Ph.D. to pretend that money “does grow on trees”?

But according to Woodward, the President should have followed their recommendations on trade policy, about which they have no special credentials? For good measure, Greenspan knows about as much about manufacturing industries like steel as Hillary Clinton knows about winning presidential elections. After all, he’s the genius who once referred to manufacturing as “something we were terrific at fifty years ago,” and “essentially a nineteenth- and twentieth-century technology.” So please, Mr. Woodward, spare us the experts worship.

By contrast, Woodward’s latest Korea example warrants more concern about the President’s competence on the job and knowledge of the issues – but unwittingly exposes the status quo as just as worrisome. Woodward had reported that last December, Mr. Trump wanted to tweet that the dependents of the 28,000 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea would be evacuated. The problem with this tweet? In th author’s words:

“[J]ust at the time, the top North Korean leader had sent a message through intermediaries to H.R. McMaster, the national security adviser, on December 4th of last year saying if you start withdrawing dependents, we will take that as a signal that war is imminent.  Now, you have a volatile leader, Kim Jong-un.  He’s got these nuclear weapons and there’s no predictable path for understanding how he might respond.  And the Pentagon leadership went nuts about this and just said, you – and the tweet never went out, but had it, you know, God knows.”

If you actually start thinking about the Korea crisis, however, you recognize that the current situation is even more dangerous. For as I’ve repeatedly written, these U.S. forces are deployed to South Korea not to help South Korean forces repel a North Korean attack. They’re deployed to South Korea to serve as a tripwire whose impending defeat will create overwhelming political pressure on an American president to save the day by using nuclear weapons. And the presence of these soldiers spouses and children is being counted on to make this pressure completely irresistible.

As I’ve also written, when North Korea was unable to strike American territory with nuclear weapons of its own, this strategy arguably made sense. For the nuclear threat was likely to succeed in preventing that North Korean attack in the first place because carrying it out pose no risk to America’s core security.

Now, with the rapid recent (and apparently continuing) development of North Korean nuclear forces capable of reaching North America, those days of U.S. invulnerability are unmistakably nearly over, and the American troops’ presence in South Korea are putting U.S. cities in the line of nuclear fire. Worse, they are the only recognizable source of this danger – unless you believe that North Korea has a reason to launch an unprovoked nuclear attack on the United States, and sign its literal nuclear death warrant.

In other words, because the Korean peninsula remains such a powderkeg, and because the North’s leaders are so little known and unpredictable, the danger that Woodward’s Pentagon sources allegedly are so terrified President Trump might have created exist right now, have existed ever since North Korea’s progress toward producing nuclear weapons platforms with intercontinental capabilities became known, and will continue to exist as long as Mr. Trump keeps following the Pentagon’s advice and keeps any American military presence on the peninsula.

Ironically, moreover, the best guarantee of preventing a North Korean nuclear warhead from landing on American city or two is for the President to follow his instincts, pull the troops and their dependents out, and let the local countries take the lead in dealing with North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.

Something else disturbing about the Woodward Washington Week interview: Anchor the clear reverence for the globalist Washington establishment demonstrated also by the show’s moderator, Robert Costa, who, like Woodward, works for the Washington Post. It came through when Costa told Woodward that what most surprised him about the book was “the effort that’s being made by so many people around him to bring him back into the mainstream, back towards certain norms.” It came through in his reference to “keeping President Trump in line” and “keep Trump moving toward the center.” And it came through in his question to Woodward,

“Do the people around [Trump] who are taking documents off of his desk, different trade agreements the president’s trying to rip up, do they see themselves, when you talk to them, as heroes?  Or do they know they are, in a sense, mounting, as you call it, an administrative coup d’etat?”

What Costa, Woodward – and so many other Mainstream Media journalists – need to understand is that the “norms” reportedly being protected in Woodward’s book aren’t the Ten Commandments or any other code of decency, justice, or democracy. The administration officials reportedly defying the President’s wishes aren’t some modern collective embodiment of Moses. And the center isn’t ipso facto the location of policy wisdom, or even sanity.

Instead, the norms are positions developed by flawed and often self-interested human beings. More specifically, the administration’s Never Trump-ers could also be motivated by simple desires to protect and restore the positions of power, privilege, and wealth their kind enjoyed almost unchallenged until the Trump Revolution. And fetishizing the center amounts to judging these positions only by their relationship to other alternatives that may be widely voiced but also equally off-base, not by their relationship to realities on the ground.

That is, Woodward’s globalist sources for Fear need to be scrutinized just as thoroughly as the President they oppose – especially since their often catastrophic failures did much to put Mr. Trump in power. You could even write a book.

Im-Politic: Washington’s Real Crazytown

Tags

alliances, anonymous op-ed, Bob Woodward, Fear, foreign policy establishment, Gary Cohn, Im-Politic, Jim Mattis, North Korea, nuclear war, South Korea, The New York Times, Trade, tripwire, Trump, Washington Post

“Crazytown” – that’s the memorable term reportedly used by Donald Trump’s Chief of Staff John F. Kelly to describe the White House under a President portrayed as dangerously erratic both in an upcoming book by legendary Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward (which contains this claim), and in an op-ed article published in The New York Times yesterday anonymously by an author who supposedly is a “senior” administration official.

I haven’t read the full book (titled Fear) yet, but what’s made stunningly and ironically clear in the excerpts that have appeared in the Post is that “crazytown” is actually a description most richly deserved by the national bipartisan foreign and economic policy establishments from which The Times author clearly comes, and whose administration representatives surely provided Woodward with much of his material.

My reason for this conclusion? The treatment of Korea trade and national security issues described in Fear.

According to the Post account, “Again and again, Woodward recounts at length how Trump’s national security team was shaken by his lack of curiosity and knowledge about world affairs and his contempt for the mainstream perspectives of military and intelligence leaders.”

And two prime (and related) examples of the team’s efforts to “control his impulses and prevent disasters, both for the president personally and for the nation he was elected to lead”? The President’s desire to pull U.S. troops out of the Korean peninsula, and to withdraw from the trade deal reached by his predecessor, Barack Obama, with South Korea.

In one Post description of an episode described in Fear:

“At a National Security Council meeting on Jan. 19, Trump disregarded the significance of the massive U.S. military presence on the Korean Peninsula, including a special intelligence operation that allows the United States to detect a North Korean missile launch in seven seconds vs. 15 minutes from Alaska, according to Woodward. Trump questioned why the government was spending resources in the region at all.

“‘We’re doing this in order to prevent World War III,’ Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told him.”

Another Post account specifies that “Trump at one point asked his military leaders why the United States couldn’t just withdraw from the Korean Peninsula.”

Yet as known by RealityChek regulars, Mr. Trump’s positions were not only completely rational. They’re the height of prudence. For North Korea has rapidly been nearing the ability to hit the U.S. mainland with a nuclear warhead. The American forces on the peninsula were still playing exactly the same tripwire role they had played before this American vulnerability had emerged – i.e., by virtue of their inability to defend themselves with conventional weapons alone, virtually forcing a U.S. President to escalate any conflict with North Korea to the nuclear level.

Nowadays, or very soon, the result could well be exposing the American homeland to an almost unimaginably destructive strike from Pyongyang. And the continuing U.S. alliance with South Korea and that military presence remains the only reason that North Korea would even think of risking a nuclear exchange with the vastly superior American strategic deterrent. Therefore, the alliance is the only reason that Washington would need to value early warning of a North Korea missile launch.

That is, President Trump has recognized that the cost-benefit calculus in Korea has changed fundamentally – and for the worse for the United States. Conventional thinkers like Mattis are still living in a world in which America can offer nuclear protection to allies without fear of losing an entire city – or two, or three – and in which it was reasonable to risk “World War III” for a country with only modest strategic or economic significance for the United States.

Indeed, the most compelling criticism that can be leveled against the President’s North Korea policies is that he hasn’t acted on his (accurate) instincts, and ordered a military withdrawal from the peninsula.

Similar reactions are justified by the Woodward contention that former White House chief economic adviser Gary Cohn (in the Post‘s words) “tried to tamp down Trump’s strident nationalism regarding trade” by stealing a letter off Mr. Trump’s desk “that the president was intending to sign to formally withdraw the United States from a trade agreement with South Korea. Cohn later told an associate that he removed the letter to protect national security and that Trump did not notice that it was missing.”

After all, it’s bad enough that Mattis thinks the United States still should risk nuclear attack to protect South Korea. It’s positively whacko to think, as Cohn apparently believed, that South Korea would renounce its alliance with the United States out of anger at President Trump for exiting the trade agreement. Who else did Cohn suppose would protect the South from the North’s vastly superior military forces? And if he really did fear that Seoul would tell its defender to take a hike because of a trade dispute, then why would he consider South Korea to be a reliable ally in the first place – especially once any shooting started? So good riddance to this one-time Wall Street plutocrat. 

There’s undeniably a case to be made that Donald Trump lacks some, much, or any of the temperament and judgment to be President. But here’s what’s also undeniable. His establishment foes (who style themselves “the adults in the room”) still cling to policies that are needlessly endangering literally millions of American lives; that have already just as needlessly cost many millions more Americans their jobs, their homes, and much of their incomes; and that have wasted trillions of dollars on ill-conceived foreign military ventures. If the choice is between this record and “Crazytown,” I’ll take the latter any day. And it’s anything but surprising that, two years ago, nearly 63 million Americans agreed.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: CNBC Interview Now On-Line, Plus Background Info & Context

Tags

China, CNBC, Made in China 2025, North Korea, tariffs, Trade, Trade Deficits, Trump, {What's Left of) Our Economy

I’m pleased to announce that the video is now on-line of my interview yesterday on CNBC on President Trump’s new announced tariffs on imports from China. Click here to see it.

As is usually the case, though, the segment was way too short to deal with all the aspects and angles of this decision that deserve attention. So here’s some material I prepared for the segment producer at her request the night before the broadcast. Sharp-eyed RealityChek regulars will find some of these points familiar, but to me, that just goes to show that many of the questions that have surrounded Mr. Trump’s trade policies since his inauguration remain either completely unanswered, or largely unanswered – as do many of the potential pluses and minuses. These talking points are as follows: 

“1. Although the White House may announce the tariff list tomorrow, it remains far from certain that all, or any, of them will actually be imposed. The Section 301 law providing their statutory basis permits the U.S. Trade Rep’s office 30 days to put them in place after the order formally appears in the Federal Register. In addition, the President could delay the duties up to 180 more days (i.e., after the midterm elections) if he determines that significant progress is being made in trade talks with China, or that the delay would encourage such progress.

“2. Less formally, these windows could enable the President to delay the tariffs’ imposition in order to encourage China to remain cooperative on the North Korea crisis. Mr. Trump has most recently declared his determination to go ahead with the tariffs despite acknowledging China’s help vis-a-vis Kim Jong Un, but at times in the past, he’s linked decisions to ease up or postpone such tariff decisions because of China’s purportedly cooperative attitude. And on a related issue, just before his summit with Kim, he explicitly called his decision to lift the “death penalty” on China telecoms firm ZTE a favor to Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

“3. I personally believe that any linkage between China trade policy and North Korea policy would be a serious mistake, as it assumes that Beijing is helping the United States defuse tensions on the peninsula as an act of charity, rather than a course of action that is squarely in China’s interest. As a result, linkage could reward China for taking steps it would have taken anyway.

“4. The President deserves major credit for recognizing that diplomacy and engagement alone have not sufficed to stem the economic and national security threats presented by China’s wide array of predatory trade and investment policies, exemplified most recently by its Made in China 2025 programs.

“5. In particular, Mr. Trump has recognized that U.S. allies are simply not serious about making significant contributions to a multilateral effort to combat China’s trade and broader economic predation. Similarly, he understands that the WTO is completely inadequate to this task, and that unilateral American action has long been essential.

“6. But his policies can be faulted in several respects.

“a. Some of his China-related goals seem flatly contradictory. Chiefly, the President says he wants to reduce the massive bilateral trade deficit America runs with China. But he also wants China to reduce its recent harassment of U.S. and other foreign companies and make it easier for them to do business in China. If the Chinese agree on the latter, much of the increased American (and other) corporate investment in China will wind up producing goods for export to the United States, thereby increasing the deficit.

“b. Tariffs on imports from China, all else equal, could well reduce the bilateral trade imbalance – especially if China opens its markets wider to U.S. exports, too. But the impact could be limited because shipments from other countries are likely to fill the gap to some extent.

“c. In addition, Mr. Trump should be paying more attention to the makeup of the trade deficit. In this regard, he has (erroneously) indicated that he would satisfied to see stepped up American exports of farm and energy products to accomplish much and even most of the deficit-reduction goal. But it’s much more important to narrow the gap in high value manufacturing industries, which make a much greater contribution to the American economy.

“d. The President is going to remain under attack on the tariff front from industries and sectors of the economy that might suffer losses, and these criticisms could well undercut GOP candidates in the upcoming midterm elections. He will also be criticized for taking measures the increase consumer prices. He could have preempted many of these criticisms in two main ways:

“First, earlier in his term, he should have strongly backed the border adjustment tax contained in the original Republican tax bill. This measure would have in effect both imposed a 20 percent tariff on imports and given a 20 percent subsidy to American exports. And since it would have been across-the-board, it would have provided protection and subsidies for both producers of finished goods (e.g., steel- and aluminum-using industries), and of the inputs for these finished goods.

“Second, he should be doing a much better job of persuading the American people that any change as disruptive as the new trade policies he’s begun to put into effect are bound to entail some short-term costs and sacrifices, but that the long-term benefits are well worth the candle. Tweets are not nearly enough. He needs a full-court PR press – Oval Office speeches, rallies, town hall meetings, the works.”

Another important point I wasn’t able to make: It’s true that, as the anchors and the other guest maintained, most economists think that trade deficits don’t matter to the health of a national economy. But as explained in the post linked here, this claim dangerously overlooks how trade deficits, and especially their increase, inevitably worsen the quality of the economy’s growth and makeup, and weaken the foundations of sustainable prosperity.    

 

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Real Trump-Kim Summit Danger

Tags

alliances, de-nuclearization, Kim Jong Un, North Korea, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, sanctions, Trump, Trump Kim summit

I’m still skeptical about the prospects for the upcoming summit between President Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un – but not mainly for the slew of reasons trotted out by the Never Trump chattering class since this historic meeting began taking shape.

For example, it’s true that the President has little international negotiating experience. But which of the so-called experts expounding endlessly on the summit in recent weeks – especially those who worked in previous U.S. Administrations – has any record of dealing with the North Koreans that can be accurately described as anything else but abject failure? In fact, if Kim is as unconventional (to put it diplomatically) a leader as he’s commonly described, maybe Mr. Trump’s decades of dealing in the dog-eat-dog New York City real estate world will be much more useful background than anything that can be provided by CIA briefing books.

Has the President already handed North Korea an unearned, unreciprocated victory by agreeing to meet with Kim in the first place? This charge assumes that face-to-face talks with an American leader greatly adds to his North Korean counterpart’s legitimacy. But it’s hard to see how. Kim’s rule in North Korea isn’t based on any form of popular consent. Like his father and grandfather, his hold on power owes exclusively on repression. And in terms of global opinion, this indictment leaves two crucial questions unanswered. First, why on earth is Kim’s global image the slightest bit relevant to U.S.-North Korea diplomacy? And second, what thinking person would fundamentally change his or her views on Kim’s stature or record, or whatever criteria is chosen, solely, or to any extent, because he’s photographed side-by-side with a U.S. President?

Will Mr. Trump turn out to be over-anxious for success and agree to a cosmetic or outright bad deal just to boost his ego, or his domestic poll numbers – and Republicans’ chances in this fall’s midterm elections? This concern actually resembles my own principal fear, but my underlying reasons are fundamentally different (and much more coherent) than those of run-of-the-mill Trump critics. And more important, the policy conclusions I draw remain fundamentally different.

The Trump critics seem to define a bad deal as one in which the President makes concrete concessions to North Korea (say, some relaxation of economic sanctions, or the withdrawal of some U.S. military forces) in return for vague or misleading or unenforceable promises by Kim to take some steps to start dismantling his nuclear arsenal. In addition, it’s argued that if this pattern drags on, North Korea could pocket valuable gains (a stronger economy, an improved military position on the Korean peninsula, more time to make more covert progress on its nuclear program) at the expense of the United States and its South Korean and Japanese allies. And don’t forget the alarms expressed at the prospect that, if Mr. Trump concludes he’s been snookered, he’ll angrily cut off the negotiations and – much worse – his administration could resume military threats that eventually, whether intentionally or not, trigger real conflict.

The main problem with the critics’ warnings isn’t that they’re far-fetched. Indeed, they’re all too plausible. Instead, the main problem is that the bulk of the critics have urged North Korea policies that would create many of the same dangers – principally, American agreement to relax the sanctions, and/or to military steps like halting certain exercises condemned as needlessly provocative by the North but essential for maintaining readiness, in exchange for moves by Kim that would fall way short of complete, verifiable de-nuclearization.

In other words, the critics, like the over-anxious Trump of their purported nightmares, seem to be willing to live for quite some time with a North Korea that remains a formidable nuclear power, and with one that might keep on perfecting a weapon that could destroy one or more American cities in the event of a peninsular war. As I’ve explained, this arsenal, along with the ongoing presence of a U.S. tripwire military force, could easily produce a White House decision to enter a war that might result in almost unimaginable damage to the American homeland.

I’m not saying that this terrifying scenario will unfold inevitably. Nor am I completely pessimistic about the stars aligning for success over time – such as Kim’s reported determination to develop North Korea’s primitive economy (for reasons that include a self-interested calculation that more domestic prosperity is his best bet for regime survival), the Trump administration’s promise to maintain its intensified sanctions in the absence of major de-nuclearization progress, and Kim’s possible fear that the administration’s talk about preemptive or preventive war isn’t just bluster.

What I am saying is that the uncertainties are still so great, and the stakes (a nuclear attack on American soil) are so high, that it remains reckless to assume any needless risk to the nation at all. And the best way by far to eliminate needless risk from the Korea nuclear crisis, as I’ve written repeatedly, is to remove American troops from the peninsula and to allow North Korea’s neighbors to deal with its nuclear arsenal however they wish.

Such a withdrawal would remove any rational reason for Kim to attack the United States with his nuclear weapons in the event of a peninsular war. And an American threat to retaliate massively for an attack on its own territory would be almost infinitely more credible than a threat to retaliate for an attack on another country – especially if and when North Korea develops intercontinental nuclear strike capabilities.

The drawbacks of withdrawal should by now be familiar – destabilization and possibly war in East Asia, and a missed opportunity to end finally a frightening, decades-long threat to this region of big populations and economies. But the advantages – which are not nearly familiar enough because the nuclear risks of America’s alliances policies have been obscured from the public for so long – entail minimizing the chances of what would be by orders of magnitude the worst catastrophe in the country’s history. What a tragedy – and indeed scandal – that this question is still open.