Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Why America’s Alliance Strategy Can’t Have it All

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alliances, allies, burden sharing, China, defense spending, Financial Times, Germany, James Mattis, Japan, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, North Korea, nuclear war, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, smothering, South Korea, Trump

Decades ago (literally!) I came up with an insight that’s stood the test of time pretty well. When my main professional focus was American foreign policy, I began realizing that the best way to describe the U.S. approach to its major security alliances with East Asian and European countries was to call it a “smothering strategy.” That is, American leaders were trying not only to protect Japan and Western Europe specifically from communist aggression. They were also trying to make sure that those critical regions never exploded into major war again – and principally, that Germany and Japan never resumed their roles as aggressors.

The characteristic U.S. solution? Washington would try to smother these German and Japanese impulses by removing their need to conduct any kind of independent foreign policies of their own in the first place. That’s why the United States pledged to take care of both their national security interests (with dangerous nuclear defense commitments) and their economic interests (by opening its economy much wider to their exports than vice versa). As a result, for decades, Germans (and other Europeans) and Japanese could avoid the expenses of maintaining big military establishments and concentrate tightly on the peacetime pursuits of life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness – not to mention building great wealth.

How good was this insight? To me, the proof of the pudding was America’s determination to preserve these alliances almost unchanged even after the Cold War ended, the Soviet Union disappeared, and China had not yet launched a drive to boost its influence in East Asia. To put it bluntly, U.S. leaders were still terrified that, if they were forced to face the world on their own once more, the Germans and Japanese would go bonkers again.

But this past week came some evidence that the smothering strategy is still firmly in place – despite the election of an American President who has complained loudly as a candidate as well as in office about how these arrangements are inexcusable rip-offs of the American public and especially taxpayers. At a big national security conference held each year in Germany, Trump administration officials expressed alarm at the prospect that some European initiatives to boost military spending that have barely advanced past the talking stage could might result in European forces at least sometime operating independently of their alliance with the United States – the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) – and even excluding America.

According to a Financial Times account of the meeting, U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis reacted by insisting that these European Union “defence plans…enhance Nato’s common defence rather than detract from it. And he put down an important marker: there was, he said, a clear understanding that common defence is a Nato mission that belongs to Nato ‘alone’.”

In other words, the Trump administration has now fallen into both of the traps that ensnared U.S. alliance policy during the Cold War. It has assured the allies that its commitment to their defense is absolute – including the risk of fighting a nuclear war on their behalf – thereby gutting any incentives for them to stop “free riding” on the United States militarily and bearing a greater share of the defense burden. And it has made clear that, although it wants the allies to assume more responsibilities for their own defense, it opposes the allies gaining any more control over their own defense. Instead, the United States must remain firmly in charge.

As a foreign policy realist, who believes that national interests are much more important than particular alliances, and can clash with the preservation of these alliances, I don’t blame the Trump-ers for wanting to have their cake and eat it, too on this score – i.e., more allied resources to use as Washington wishes. Nor do I blame the Europeans for wanting as much defense assistance from Americans as they can get while continuing to skimp on their military budgets.

But as an American, I wish the administration would recognize two fatal flaws in this alliance strategy status quo. The first is the un-realism of straining to freeze alliance structures in place when the common enemy that represented their raison d’etre has been gone for nearly thirty years. The second entails the needless dangers created by continuing to provide nuclear guarantees – and the tripwire forces needed to draw it into Armageddon – for these allies when not even the partial revival of Russian and Chinese threats (along with North Korea’s development of ever more advanced nuclear weapons) has fostered consensus in how to handle them.

Of course, dissolving these alliances will entail risks. But the risks of trying to square these circles look far greater. And when considering the nuclear threats they now pose (from those North Korean as well as Chinese forces that are much more capable of credibly threatening the United States with nuclear attack, along with Russia’s Cold War holdover arsenal), they look harder to justify than ever.

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Our So-Called Foreign Policy: More Upside-Down U.S. Thinking on the Korea Crisis

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alliances, allies, globalism, North Korea, nuclear war, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, South Korea, The Wall Street Journal, tripwire, Trump, Walter Russell Mead, Winter Olympics

It was great to see earlier this month that Walter Russell Mead was chosen by The Wall Street Journal to be its regular foreign affairs columnist. Mead has often (though not always) been an important voice for a broadly realist approach to American foreign policy (meaning one that understands the need to set at least some finite priorities because not all good things are possible simultaneously). He’s also been a serious and insightful student of U.S. diplomatic history. Therefore, his new position seemed to guarantee that some badly needed diversity would be added to a Mainstream Media pundits lineup that has long been completely dominated by globalists of the left and right. (The Journal has specialized in the latter.)

That’s why it was so disappointing to see that in his recent, second Journal offering, Mead has lapsed into the thoroughly bizarre (but characteristic) globalist habit of viewing America’s security alliances as mattering more to the United States than to the allies.

The passage in question comes about a third of the way in. According to Mead, the real diplomatic winner of the current Winter Olympics in South Korea is not, as widely reported, Kim Yo Jong, the visiting sister of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Instead, it was South Korean President Moon Jae In. That’s a perfectly reasonable conclusion. So was the first part of Mead’s explanation: “Mr. Moon got a political boost from Ms. Kim’s visit and the appearance of a thaw between the Koreas, but he avoided the backlash from appearing naive or overeager.”

It’s the second part of the author’s analysis that has gone off the deep end: Moon “also reminded the Americans that South Korea cannot be taken for granted; without Seoul’s support, the Trump administration’s North Korea policy is unsustainable.”

Actually, in a narrow sense, Mead makes a novel and (disturbingly) convincing case for this proposition: The campaign to force North Korea to the nuclear bargaining table

“has been Mr. Trump’s most effective diplomatic and political effort to date. The administration has moved B-1 bombers and F-35 fighters to the Korean Peninsula during annual military exercises. It has reached out diplomatically to countries ranging from China to Indonesia. It has coordinated speeches by officials at the Pentagon, State Department and White House to keep the government on message.

“This is the sort of orchestration that the Trump administration, and the president in particular, is supposed to be too undisciplined to carry out. The relative success of the North Korea process suggests that Mr. Trump and his staff may be more capable than critics expected in operating the complex machinery of American power.”

It’s certainly possible that, at least in an unwitting way, the President and his aides place precisely this value on their North Korea strategy. But if so, the administration would be prizing image-making over elements of strategy that are not only fundamental, but existential – and needlessly exposing the United States to the risk of nuclear attack in the process.

For even if the Trump-ers are clinging to the appearance of success or competence in their North Korea policy, the overriding reality is that American power right now is the only obstacle currently blocking a North Korean military conquest of the South, or a South Korean future dominated by endless blackmail from the militarily superior North.

Consequently, although a successful American North Korea strategy could burnish the Trump administration’s resume, and possibly shore up its domestic political support, for South Korea, it’s literally a matter of national survival at worst and of genuine independence at best.

Unfortunately, moreover, Mead’s column also explicitly makes the broader and completely ludicrous globalist argument that allies like South Korea enjoy at least as much leverage in these relationships as the United States. And as a result, he too overlooks the yawning asymmetry in the respective sets of national interests involved.

Hence his contention that crucial to any diplomatic effort to denuclearize North Korea is “the need to keep America’s alliances united. The Winter Olympics kerfuffle should remind the White House that maintaining coordinated policies with Mr. Moon will be vital in the months and years to come.”

Far more important to recognize, however – and especially given the emergence of nuclear risk to the U.S. homeland – is that by virtue of geography and military power, the United States boasts inherent options in the Korean crisis that South Korea lacks. And the principal such option is washing the nation’s hands of this entire mess.

So if any party to this relationship needs to avoid taking the other for granted, it’s South Korea. All the more so because, as I’ve written, the “tripwire” mission of U.S. forces in South Korea aims to ensure that, in the event of war, Washington comes to the South’s rescue with nuclear weapons – and before too long could thereby trigger a successful North Korean nuclear strike on an American city.

That’s not to say that South Korea lacks the right to take the lead in Korean Peninsula diplomacy, or any legitimate interests in doing so. It merits exactly these rights and interests, precisely because no country outside the peninsula has remotely comparable stakes in a peaceful resolution.

But by the same token, the United States has the right to insist that any country expecting America to run catastrophic risk on its behalf pay a price in the form of deferring to its judgment. And for the sake of the American people’s security, their leaders have an overriding obligation to remind such allies that, if they’re unhappy with these terms, they will be more than welcome to handle whatever threats they face on their own.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Establishment Goes Farther Off the Deep End on North Korea

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alliances, allies, China, Cold War, deterrence, James Jeffrey, Japan, North Korea, nuclear war, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, South Korea, Soviet Union, The Atlantic, Trump

James Jeffrey’s new post in The Atlantic on the North Korea nuclear crisis has so much to commend it. (Yes, there’s a “but” coming, and it’s enormous, but let’s give him his due.)

The former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey and Iraq valuably reminds readers of the dangers of assuming – as per the latest conventional wisdom – that North Korea’s motives for developing nuclear forces potent enough to threaten the American homeland are purely defensive. This confidence, he notes, may be convenient for justifying a call for the United States to clear the way for a negotiated solution to the crisis by backing off its longstanding insistence on Pyongyang’s denuclearization. But no one aside from Kim Jong-un himself can have any confidence in assessing what’s inside his head.

As a result, Jeffrey also recognizes that the nuclear deterrence strategy that helped prevent Soviet and Chinese aggression during the Cold War (and so far seems to be helping curb Russian and Chinese expansionism nowadays) is far from guaranteed to work against a leader with a history of erratic and even violent behavior, and who is heir to a regime with a similar history – including absorbing enormous sacrifices to “reunify” the Korean peninsula under its rule. (At the same time, Jeffrey seems to undercut these arguments at the end by calling the denuclearization goal unreasonable, and signaling his support for a compromise that would leave the North with “some nuclear capability” in exchange for “a ‘temporary’ diplomatic solution that stops North Korean development of systems that can strike the U.S.”

In addition, Jeffrey forthrightly explains that both the Cold War deterrence strategies and their latter-day Korean counterpart depended on a gamble that involved putting the U.S. homeland at risk of nuclear attack, and denying an American president any real choice but to push the nuclear button that would surely bring this about.

Finally, the author understands that U.S. security interests could be powerfully served – and deterrence on the Korean peninsula strengthened – by encouraging South Korea and Japan to develop their own nuclear weapons (although he never addresses the objection that neither country would likely go to these lengths as long as they can free-ride on the American defense guarantee).

So Jeffrey deserves great credit for going beyond conventional foreign policy thinking in many important respects. But in the most important respect by far, he’s solidly inside the consensus – which astonishingly, and let’s face it – derangedly – believes that there is any objective that the United States could achieve that’s worth any significant risk of nuclear attack on one or more major American cities.

Specifically, the author believes that North Korea may indeed have aggressive aims, and that the nuclear forces it will soon possess will be powerful enough to keep the United States on the sidelines if he attacks the South for fear that he will strike at the American territory. As a result, he believes that “the possibility of military action against North Korea could be understood not as a ‘good thing,’ but as the ‘least bad.’”

And although he does not call on the Trump administration to launch a “preventive war” to take out the North Korean nukes, he insists that steps that could result in such an attack on the United States, namely “a preemptive strike (or generating a credible threat of one to frighten China to act against Pyongyang), however awful, could be the least risky” way to a avoid several even worse alternatives.

And what are these alternatives? On top of the conquest of the South, and “abandoning 80 years of global collective security,” or watching “China intervene to ‘check’ Pyongyang, thereby pulling South Korea (and Japan) into China’s security orbit and ending the security regime the U.S. has maintained in the Pacific since 1945.”

I agree that these would be important setbacks for American interests. But would they be worse than watching several major U.S. metropolitan areas become burning, glowing wastelands? This is where I get off the boat – and I believe anyone with a lick of sanity should follow.

Do you and the rest of the American people agree? I strongly suspect the answer to both questions is “Yes,” but re the latter, here’s what’s most outrageous, and indeed unacceptable: We have no way of knowing, because all wings of the nation’s foreign policy establishment have pursued a strategy of hiding these risks from the public.

That’s why I keep contending that, given North Korea’s impending ability to hit the United States with nuclear weapons, the only policy capable of eliminating this threat (to the extent possible) is pulling the American forces out, thereby removing any reason for North Korea to launch a nuclear strike on American territory, and allowing the powerful, wealthy countries of the region handle Kim anyway they wish. Alternatively, let’s at least put this question – literally one of life and death – directly to the Americans who have been hoodwinked for so long and who would pay the price of hewing to the status quo, and see what they think.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Why Kissinger Comes Up Short on North Korea

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alliances, China, East Asia-Pacific, foreign policy establishment, Henry Kissinger, Japan, missiles, North Korea, nuclear war, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, realism, South Korea, The Wall Street Journal

Henry Kissinger’s plan – or at least outline of a plan – to resolve the North Korea crisis is out. And even though the 94 (94!)-year old former Secretary of State and presidential national security adviser has not held public office in decades, you should pay attention because you can bet American leaders in the Executive Branch and Congress are. So are foreign governments (many of which, including China, Kissinger has made millions – at least – “consulting”for).

Kissinger’s approach, laid out in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last Friday, is definitely a cut above the usual (often dangerously misleading) drivel that most commentators have been issuing since North Korea recently demonstrated dramatic and unexpected progress toward being able to hit the U.S. homeland with a nuclear-armed missile. But since Kissinger is a creature of the foreign policy establishment that keeps clinging to an obsolete Korea strategy that is now needlessly exposing the United States to nuclear attack, his proposals ultimately fail to promote and defend America’s interests first, or even to acknowledge the deep splits that must no longer be papered over between U.S. needs and South Korean needs.

The strongest argument Kissinger makes, as I see it, is the suggestion that there’s only one way of persuading China to exert enough pressure on North Korea to achieve Pyongyang’s de-nuclearization, or to start its regime down that road. It’s emphasizing to Beijing that an increasingly powerful nuclear North Korea will inevitably lead other countries to follow suit, and place China in the middle of a ring of nuclear-armed neighbors – many of which are hardly friendly. In other words, Kissinger is identifying an especially compelling reason for China to conclude (finally) that its Korea bottom line must include defanging the North – and quickly, not one of these days.

A public statement of this reasoning also matters because it signals Kissinger’s agreement that preventing nuclear proliferation in Asia may need to take a back seat in U.S. Korea policy to the status quo/establishment position that the United States must bear the main costs and risks (including nuclear risks) of handling North Korea. Not that I doubt the dangers of a regional nuclear arms race. But if that’s the price to be paid for minimizing and possibly eliminating a nuclear to the United States itself, it’s a price that’s a clear bargain. So it’s gratifying to read that Kissinger looks to be in agreement. 

But Kissinger never explains why North Korea would relent absent the kinds of truly comprehensive and strictly enforced economic sanctions whose importance he appears to belittle or dismiss altogether. Instead, he appears to believe that a joint Sino-American statement conveying strong bilateral agreement on the peninsula’s future “would bring home to Pyongyang its isolation and provide a basis for the international guarantee essential to safeguard its outcome.” Unfortunately, nothing publicly known about the North Korean regime indicates that it’s prepared to substitute paper guarantees of its survival for the protection provided by a nuclear arsenal.

Similarly, Kissinger signals support for a solution that would leave Korea divided as at present, but that would trade off de-nuclearization in the North for a permanent ban on reintroducing American nuclear weapons to South Korea (which were removed by former President George H.W. Bush in 1991) and an international agreement prohibiting Seoul from developing its own nuclear arms. But in addition to the “paper promises” problem, Kissinger’s proposal appears to forget that nuclear weapons from anywhere have been included in strategies to defend South Korea in the first place stem from the need to offset the belligerent North’s conventional superiority – which it presumably would still enjoy. So a dangerous military imbalance would be left on the peninsula.

But my biggest complaint about Kissinger’s ideas is the apparent refusal to consider my own favored option – a U.S. military pullout from South Korea (and possibly Japan) that would deny the North any plausible reason to attack the American homeland, and that would force the powerful and wealthy countries of Northeast Asia, which have the greatest stakes by far in a viable North Korea strategy, to take on this responsibility themselves.

The risk? An entire East Asia-Pacific region that’s profoundly destabilized, and even plunged into conflict. The benefit? A dramatic reduction in the odds that a North Korean nuclear weapon would decimate an American city. Or two. Or three. This is even a close call?

Moreover, a U.S. pullout seems to be taboo to Kissinger because he, along with most of the rest of the foreign policy establishment, perversely appears to view protecting allies as being just as important as protecting the United States. What else could be mean when he warns that certain American policies “may be perceived as concentrating on protecting its own territory, while leaving the rest of Asia exposed to nuclear blackmail….”?

Not to put to fine a point on it, but when the stakes involve preventing nuclear warheads from killing possibly tens of millions of Americans, why on earth shouldn’t the United States be “perceived as concentrating on protecting its own territory”? In fact, any American leader with different priorities should be immediately removed from office and banned for life.

So I continue to admire the force of Henry Kissinger’s intellect, his mastery of a wide range of international issues (except economics), and his command of history. Yet I also continue to view him as a paragon of a peculiarly American species: a so-called diplomatic realist who is anything but.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Establishment’s Korea Nuclear Cover-Up Continues

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alliances, allies, Chicago Council on Global Affairs, East Asia, free-riding, missiles, North Korea, nuclear war, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, polls, South Korea

If a pollster asked respondents a question on the order of “Would you favor the government handing Americans unlimited amounts of money?” without specifying that “it might destroy the economy,” you wouldn’t take it very seriously, would you? In fact, you’d probably (and rightly) condemn the survey as a con job.

And that’s exactly the reaction you should have to a new “finding” by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs that this year, for the first time [since 1990, when the organization began asking the question], “a majority of Americans express support for using US forces to defend South Korea” if it was attacked by North Korea. According to the Council, moreover, this figure has risen sharply since 2015 – from 47 percent to 62 percent.

If you’re a RealityChek regular, you know why this question is fraudulent. It doesn’t tell respondents that North Korea is terrifyingly close to being able to retaliate against such U.S. military involvement by destroying an American city or two with nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles.

In fact, the question doesn’t mention anything about specific consequences for riding militarily to South Korea’s rescue. Even granting that the public realizes that wars are not picnics, the Council’s full phrasing was inexcusably anodyne:

“There has been some discussion about the circumstances that might justify using US troops in other parts of the world. Please give your opinion about some situations. Would you favor or oppose the use of US troops if North Korea invaded South Korea?”

Like the issue was simply being debated in a seminar.

Nor did the Council tell Americans why their country would need to risk blood and treasure to aid South Korea. It’s because, even though the South’s economy is vastly larger than the North’s, and even though the North actions have been threatening for decades, this long-time U.S. protectorate spends a negligible fraction of its wealth on its own defense.

So here’s what the Council should have asked:

“For nearly seventy years, the United States has pledged to defend South Korea militarily from attack by communist North Korea. But this promise was made when it created no risk for the American homeland, when the South was dirt poor, and when Washington feared that communism was on the march worldwide. Now it’s clear the North will very soon be able to launch a successful nuclear attack on the United States if it keeps its promise to the South. Since the alliance was formed, South Korea has skimped on its own defense spending even though it’s become one of the world’s richest countries. And communism is dead as a global military menace. Would you favor or oppose using U.S. troops to defend a free-riding South Korea if the result could be the nuclear destruction of an American city?”

Of course, my phrasing could be toned down. It could also add the argument American trade and other forms of business with economically dynamic East Asia would suffer if major war broke out anywhere in the region (although it’s easy to argue that business with the region has been a big net loser for the American economy), and that so far, the U.S. military presence and commitment have helped keep the peace. And to be fair, the Council didn’t mention any pro-interventionist arguments, either.

But the main point is that it’s hard to imagine any consideration surrounding the decision to intervene in a Korean war remotely comparing with this development: Until recently, Americans could be certain that their own territory would remain unscathed. Now such involvement could kill and maim millions of their compatriots, and turn important metropolitan areas into radioactive wastelands.

As I’ve long written (along with others), the American foreign policy establishment has been so irrationally wed to the country’s alliances that it’s concealed the catastrophic, and sometimes suicidal, (in the case of Europe, where the antagonist has been the Soviet Union and now Russia) dangers they have inevitably created. The only useful information contained in this Chicago Council on Global Affairs Korea finding is that, wittingly or not, this group is participating in the cover-up.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Dangerous Establishment Delusions on North Korea

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Black Hawk Down, Department of Defense, ICBMs, intercontinental ballistic missiles, James Syring, Japan, Mark Bowden, missile defense, Missile Defense Agency, North Korea, nuclear missiles, nuclear war, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, South Korea, The Atlantic

I’m really getting worried about the North Korea crisis – and not just because of the latest headline news since I last wrote on the subject. As most of you have heard or read by now, North Korea has just successfully tested a ballistic missile capable of hitting Alaska. This means that Pyongyang is perilously close to being able to hit American territory with a nuclear weapon. Given how rapid the North’s progress on this frightening front has been, it won’t be too much longer before this erratic (and I’m being charitable here) dictatorship figures out how to lengthen the range of these missiles, arm them with nuclear warheads, and put every inch of the United States in harm’s way.

Of course that’s terrifying enough. But comparably frightening is the continuingly blasé attitude that has underlain the response of the American foreign policy establishment – including a mainstream media that faithfully parrots its views. Just consider the two following items.

First, at the end of May, Admiral James Syring, head of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, said that the Pentagon’s latest test of an anti-missile system showed the military’s ability to “outpace the threat” emanating from North Korea. Not that he’s the last word on the matter, since his views could be colored by political considerations. But this statement wasn’t per se transparently unreasonable.

Yet just a week later, Syring was singing a different tune. Testifying before Congress (that is, under oath), he stated “I would not say we are comfortably ahead of the threat; I would say we are addressing the threat that we know today.” Moreover, Syring attributed his judgment to “The advancements in the last six months have caused great concern to me and others, in the advancement of and demonstration of technology of ballistic missiles from North Korea.” If that’s not an admission that his previous statement (which had been made within that six-month time frame) was baloney, I don’t know what is.

But it gets better. Last Monday came the North Korean test of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). Last Tuesday, the U.S. government confirmed the missile’s range. But a Defense Department spokesman that same day declared, “We do have confidence in our ability to defend against the limited threat, the nascent threat that is there.”

Now it’s important to remember that, as I’ve written previously, the Pentagon’s definition of success is nothing less than hair-raising. It boils down to “We’ll get most of the missiles.” As in “some of the missiles get through.” As in “big American city (or two or three?) gets obliterated.” Indeed, the DoD spokesman repeated that very definition when he discussed the missile defense program’s track record so far: “It’s something we have mixed results on. But we also have an ability to shoot more than one interceptor.”

But let’s leave aside the Pentagon’s disturbing habit of practically defining out of existence the horrific costs of even a single failure. We still have a senior official telling us before the latest North Korean test that the nation is behind the curve, defense-wise, and then right after that test, one of his colleagues sending the message that all’s well. Pardon me for not feeling incredibly confident.

The second major sign of scary North Korea-related thinking comes from a post in The Atlantic by the magazine’s national correspondent, Mark Bowden. It needs to be specified here that Bowden is the author of Black Hawk Down, the widely and rightly acclaimed account of the debacle that brought to an end the Clinton administration’s looney military intervention in Somalia in the early 1990s. So he’s not your typical bloviating mainstream media pundit.

And that’s why I was so startled to read these passages in his July 5 essay on the implications of the latest North Korean missile test. According to Bowden, Pyongyang’s capabilities don’t “fundamentally alter the military standoff that has been in place for decades.” Why not? Because North Korean dictator Kim Jong and his father before him

“have long had the capability of inflicting mass casualties on South Korea and the nearly 30,000 American forces stationed there. In recent years, the range of Pyongyang’s missiles has included Guam and targets in Japan….So unless the lives of Americans on American soil are inherently more significant than the lives of those serving in that part of the world, or than Korean and Japanese lives, the game is the same. When death tolls are unthinkably high, it’s like multiplying infinity.”

No one of good will could dispute that, in an ideal world, all human lives – especially those of innocent civilians – are equally valuable, and indeed precious. But that’s not the kind of world we live in, and it’s a kind of world that’s been utterly unknown to our species since it wound up organizing itself into units that defined themselves at least to some extent by their distinctiveness from other units.

Today they’re called nation-states, but whether they have been family-based clans or kingdoms or empires or democratic republics or ideological dictatorships, they have invariably at some point determined that their differences could not be settled both peacefully and acceptably, and they’ve resorted to conflict. And whether their actions have been aggressive or defensive or somewhere in between, their actions have inevitably proceeded from the assumption that their subjects’ or citizens’ or comrades’ lives were, collectively, “more significant” than the collective lives of their opponents. What other assumption could they proceed from?

The same question – and answer – continually appears in peacetime, too. That’s why neither American forces nor the forces of any other countries seeking to advance humanitarian aims aren’t constantly being deployed to right wrongs across the globe – even when entire populations are being persecuted or worse. The leaderships of prospective “globocops” believe that their soldiers’ lives are “more significant” to them than the lives of those they would try to save.

And however despicably selfish these views might sound, does anyone out there, in the United States or elsewhere, really want their government to jettison this assumption and plunge into various overseas maelstroms or firestorms or powder kegs?

There is ample room for legitimate debate over how best to deal with North Korea (and Bowden’s Atlantic cover story this month does an excellent job of describing the strengths and weaknesses of the main options under discussion in Washington). There is also ample reason to suppose that some solutions could serve the interests of all the countries involved equally, or nearly equally, well.

But assuming that such win-win outcomes will be found is the height of irresponsibility. And there is absolutely no room for legitimate debate over whether the U.S. government should prioritize the interests (and lives) of its own soldiers and civilians first – at least not until Americans have the opportunity to consider the issue and unmistakably tell their leaders that their security is indeed no more important than that of, e.g., South Korea or Japan.

That, in a nutshell, is why the imminent development of North Korean missiles capable of launching nuclear attacks on American soil “fundamentally alters the military standoff” on the Korean peninsula. It’s also why I’ve concluded that the only acceptable option for the United States is to prioritize its own interests in the safest way possible, withdraw militarily from South Korea, deny the North any reason for attacking American territory, and let North Korea’s powerful neighbors decide what they can and can’t live with.

Although their lives can’t reasonably be seen by U.S. leaders as the equals of American lives, because geography makes their stakes in any outcome orders of magnitude greater, their judgments should be recognized as far superior.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Desperately Seeking Adult Polling on NATO

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allies, burden sharing, defense spending, foreign policy, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, nuclear war, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Pew Research Center, polls, Russia, Trump, vital interests

There’s not much doubt that the main purpose of this recent Pew Research Center poll was to show the unpopularity in America of President Trump’s skeptical views of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Published just before this past week’s summit of the U.S. defense alliance with many European countries, the survey finds that “Today, roughly six-in-ten Americans hold a favorable opinion of the security alliance….”

So that seems to be quite the rebuke to a president who has faulted NATO as “obsolete,” accused many members of being defense free-riders, and during the meeting declined to promise unconditionally that the United States would help militarily any alliance member that came under armed attack.

Actually, the survey once again shows that polls on foreign policy issues tend to be among the most incompetently and misleadingly crafted polls of all. I say this because the Pew researchers failed to raise in any of their questions any of the most important issues Americans need to think about as they assess the value of NATO. Maybe the best way to make the point is to present question possibilities that would make these issues clear.

First: Would you favor the United States militarily defending a NATO ally if embroiled in an armed conflict with Russia if this aid might result in a Russian nuclear attack on the United States?

Second, Would you favor the United States militarily defending a NATO ally if embroiled in an armed conflict with Russia, and running that risk of nuclear war, if the ally in question had never been considered by any U.S. president going back to Franklin D. Roosevelt to be a vital or even significant security interest of the United States?

Third, Would you favor the United States militarily defending a NATO ally if embroiled in an armed conflict with Russia, and running that risk of nuclear war, if the nuclear war risk existed largely because NATO’s European members collectively refuse to pay for militaries that could repel the Russians on their own?

In other words, a poll that measured Americans’ true beliefs about and support for NATO would be one that reminded them that, as with most of what’s important about life, different positions and decisions have important potential downsides as well as important potential upsides. And until pollsters begin informing Americans about the real choices they face on important questions of both domestic and foreign policy, it will be painfully obvious that theirs is yet another portion of the chattering classes in desperate need of some adult thinking.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Russia – and Broader – Reset That’s Urgently Needed

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China, Cold War, Europe, interest-based thinking, national interests, NATO, NATO expansion, nuclear war, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Putin, Russia, Soviet Union, spheres of influence, third world, threat-based thinking, Vietnam

Even though American policy could take a significantly different turn after Donald Trump becomes president, it’s all too likely that U.S.-Russia relations will continue heating up to worrisome temperatures for the foreseeable future. And although much American rhetoric on the subject has veered into hysteria, there’s no shortage of real-world obstacles to any new White House hopes for a cool-off – mainly Moscow’s undeniable determination to expand its influence along in Europe, where it now directly borders the U.S.-led NATO alliance. There’s also abundant (though not yet conclusive) evidence that Russia’s government tried to interfere with the 2016 American presidential election.

Russian president Vladimir Putin is by no means solely to blame for rising bilateral tensions. As I’ve written previously, much and possibly most of the problem stems from the American decision – supported by presidents and Congresses of both parties – to expand NATO right up to Russia’s doorstep after the end of the Cold War. And facing up to this wholly unnecessary, gratuitous effort to capitalize on Russia’s post-1990 weakness looks to me like the key to a genuinely successful reset of bilateral ties.

But ultimately, just as important for the United States as dealing with this urgent short-term problem is learning a lesson about how to think about its national interests that sadly was missed after the decades-long superpower struggle ended. The lesson: The key to foreign policy success is basing actions on identifying overseas interests of intrinsic, material importance, rather than on assumptions about actual or potential adversaries.

During the Cold War, American foreign policymakers across the board used both sets of criteria as lodestars – and created big, unnecessary trouble for the nation as a result. Washington reasonably treated the security of, for example, Western Europe and Japan as vital interests of the United States – because these regions were reasonably judged to be centers of critical economic and therefore military capability and potential. Losing them to Soviet influence could indeed have tilted the balance of global power against the United States in genuinely damaging ways. Moreover, an equally reasonable determination was made that Western Europe and Japan could be defended at acceptable cost and risk to America.

Tragically, however, this form of “interest-based” thinking was not applied to much of the developing world. In these regions of Latin America, Asia, and Africa, major defense commitments were taken on even though the countries in question were typically of little or no intrinsic interest to the United States – in terms of their actual or (realistically potential) wealth or military power, their raw materials, or even their location.

Instead, Washington based policy on the type of threat it concluded was posed by these countries, by ascendant forces within them, or by Soviet or Chinese designs on them or activity within their borders. Therefore, as I’ve written, Americans consumed themselves with debates over subjects like:

>whether rival superpowers’ activity in these areas was fundamentally offensive in nature or defensive;

>whether the relationships between these rival superpowers and local forces were simply alliances of convenience that meant little in the long run and could be easily broken up with appropriate U.S. overtures, or whether they were strongly ideological ties with real staying power; and similarly

>whether the local forces themselves should be seen simply as Soviet of Chinese pawns (and therefore needed to be fought on some level), or whether they were fundamentally nationalistic and on “the right side of history” (and therefore needed to be accepted and cooperated with).

These are all fascinating questions, and the resulting debate made fascinating reading – at least from an academicky or purely rhetorical standpoint. But they were dangerously off-base as fundamental determinants of American policy. The main reason: They all presented supposed answers to questions that are virtually unknowable – unless we imagine that certain foreign policy-makers and analysts are mind-readers or have highly reliable crystal balls. Disaster in Vietnam – a war never consistently, or even often, justified for intrinsically important reasons – reveals the price America can pay for indulging in these fantasies.

Defining specific, concrete U.S. interests is no science, either. But answers here are relatively knowable. Sure, subjectivity can’t be avoided. But Americans depend on our government to make judgments like this all the time. If the nation has decided otherwise, then it’s hard to make the case for any government at all.

How should this argument affect how Americans think about the new Russia challenges in Europe? Principally, they should stop focusing on whether Putin is a new version of the Soviet leaders who many thought aimed at worldwide dominion, or simply a nationalist feeling besieged by the West and seeking greater security along Russia’s frontiers. And they should start focusing on the intrinsic importance of the countries that Putin seems to be threatening.

In other words, how has Washington viewed Ukraine or Georgia or Moldova? What about new NATO members such as Poland or Hungary or the Baltic countries? Have they ever been placed in the category of vital interests, either from a national security or economic standpoint? Have U.S. leaders ever been willing to risk war on their behalf, even when the United States enjoyed a nuclear monopoly or overwhelming superiority? If the answers here are “No” (Spoiler alert: It is.), then has anything about these countries and their concrete and even perceived value changed since the end of the Cold War? In fact, has anything about them economically or strategically changed other than new NATO membership in some cases?

In my view, history makes obvious that the answer to those latter questions is “No” as well. Further, nothing has happened either in these parts of Europe, or in the American or Russian militaries, that has made them more easily defended by the West with conventional weapons alone than during the Cold War.

So it’s easy to see how more threat-based thinking can too easily lead Washington into a corner in which its only choice to defend all of its new treaty allies from some new form of Russian hegemony is to threaten nuclear war more loudly; and how interest-based thinking can lead to the alternative of offering to recognize how geography inevitably (however sadly) relegates these countries to a Russian sphere of influence, and seeking the best possible arrangement for them. And it’s even easier to see which alternative, however imperfect, is vastly superior.