Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Why a Real America First European Security Policy is More Urgent than Ever

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alliances, America First, Article Five, Cato Institute, China, Cold War, coupling, EU, Europe, European Council on Foreign Relations, European Union, extended deterrence, globalism, NATO. North Atlantic Treaty Organization, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Pew Research Center, Russia, Ted Galen Carpenter, tripwires, Trump

Even if the Cato Institute’s Ted Galen Carpenter wasn’t one of my closest friends, I’d still be writing this post highlighting his op-ed piece earlier this week for the Washington Post. Because it absolutely decimates the claim that all that ails the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), America’s oldest national security alliance, is recklessly mindless norms-buster Donald Trump.

Instead, Carpenter reports on overwhelming evidence that the arrangement, which since 1949 has committed the United States to the defense of first Western Europe and now most of Europe (and at considerable risk of nuclear attack on the U.S. homeland), is critically ill mainly because, in the decades since the end of the Cold War, U.S. and European interests have been steadily – and inevitably – diverging. And these findings add powerfully to the case that America’s globalist military commitment to Europe has become dangerously outdated.

The evidence consists of polling data showing unmistakably that European publics no longer believe that their governments should side with the United States in its disputes and conflicts with Russia (whose perceived threat Western Europe’s independence during its post-World War II decades as the Soviet Union sparked NATO’s creation in the first place), or that they should even rally to each other’s defense.

The Russia-focused results come from a September survey conducted by the European Council on Foreign Relations, and are based on the views of no less than 60,000 individuals from fourteen countries belonging to the European Union (EU) – an economic organization not officially related to NATO but many of whose member countries are U.S. NATO allies as well.

The bottom line – which Carpenter rightly describes as “startling”? “When asked ‘Whose side should your country take in a conflict between the United States and Russia?’ the majority of respondents in all 14 E.U. countries said ‘neither’.”

Some of the country-specific results?

“In France, only 18 percent would back the United States, while 63 percent opt for neutrality; in Italy, it’s 17 percent vs. 65 percent, and in Germany, 12 percent to 70 percent.

“The results were similar even in NATO’s newer East European members, despite their greater exposure to Russian pressure and potential aggression. Hungarian respondents selected neutrality over supporting the United States 71 percent to 13 percent, while Romanians did so 65 percent to 17 percent. Even in Poland, a country whose history with Moscow during both the Czarist and Soviet periods was especially frosty, neutralist sentiment had the edge, 45 percent to 33 percent.”

What’s especially disturbing, and indeed outrageous, from an American standpoint is that since NATO’s founding, European governments have insisted that U.S. troops be stationed on the continent to serve (as in South Korea) in a trip-wire role – which RealityChek regulars knows means units deployed close enough to invasion routes and vulnerable enough to the superior conventional militaries of aggressors practically to force American Presidents to use nuclear weapons to save them if conflict breaks out.

This policy of “extended deterrence,” or “coupling,” has been intended to prevent such conflicts from breaking out in the first place. What’s dangerous for the United States of course – and needlessly so – is that if deterrence fails, nuclear weapons use could expose American territory to a retaliatory nuclear strike, even though the United States itself may not be at risk.

Even worse: Throughout the Cold War, NATO non-nuclear forces were inferior to their Soviet and Soviet satellite counterparts because the European allies preferred to free-ride on the U.S. military guarantee instead of spending funds they all could have afforded for armed forces capable of self-defense.

For good measure, moreover, this European Council on Foreign Relations poll showed that Europeans are just about as ambivalent in joining with the United States if a conflict with China broke out.

Of course, even though the lopsided nature of the results indicates that these European views have been long in the making, it’s not entirely crazy to believe that Mr. Trump’s election has been so alarming to these populations that the shift did actually begin with his 2016 victory. But as Carpenter points out, a survey from the Pew Research Center conducted in 2015 demonstrates that NATO’s core principles were in deep trouble in Europe well before the President even declared his candidacy for the Oval Office.

Pew sampled opinion in eight NATO members and found that 49 percent of respondents opposed their country coming to the defense of other allies. And majorities in key alliance members France, Italy, and Germany alike rejected “fulfilling their country’s obligation to fulfill the Article 5 treaty pledge to consider an attack on any NATO member as an attack on all.” Crucially, Article 5 of the NATO treaty embodies the notion of collective security. In other words, it literally makes NATO NATO.

Carpenter rightly concludes that “the concept of transatlantic solidarity, even on collective defense, is now largely confined to out-of-touch political elites on both sides of the Atlantic.” Just as important, he notes that “it will be hard to sustain policies that increasingly run counter to the wishes of popular majorities.”

Ironically, however, despite his harsh criticisms of NATO allies’ free-riding and periodic swipes at the alliance as possibly obsolete, President Trump is increasingly acting like one of those out-of-touch globalist mainstays who urgently needs to see these poll results. For despite the warnings sounded by these polls that the United States won’t be able to rely on the European governments and their militaries even if shooting breaks out in Europe, he’s actually strengthened American forces on the continent – including in Poland, right on the Russian border.

In other words, an avowedly America First President is binding his country’s fate to that of Europe at the very moment when disengagement is more important than ever.

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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.

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.

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

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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.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: North Korea, China, & the (Inevitable) Limits of Diplomacy

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agriculture, China, commodities, diplomacy, energy, Iran, Kim Jong Un, LIbya, Made in China 2025, manufacturing, Muammar el-Qaddafi, North Korea, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, Saddam Hussein, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, tariffs, technology, Trade, trade deficit, tripwire, Trump, Ukraine

Diplomacy has sure taken a beating these last few days. And revealingly, that looks like a good thing.

Let me explain: I have no problem whatever with countries trying to resolve their differences peacefully, through dialogue and compromise. But in the nuclear age, and especially after America’s Vietnam debacle, this age-old concept has turned into a foreign policy magic bullet in the United States – including among the nation’s bipartisan globalist establishment. So the collapse (for now) of plans for a summit between President Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, and the failure so far of the President to make any headway in curbing China’s predatory trade practices, could be welcome developments. For these developments could remind Americans of diplomacy’s limits in promoting U.S. national interests (the overriding priority of the nation’s foreign policy), and how even on crucial issues of war and peace, it can be completely pointless and even dangerously distracting.

On North Korea, there have always been strong grounds for skepticism that negotiations could achieve America’s main objective – the complete elimination of Kim Jong Un’s nuclear weapons. It’s true that Kim has appeared more interested in economic reform than his father or grandfather – who preceded him in power. Therefore, in principle, he would be more responsive to economic carrots and sticks. On the one hand, he might be amenable to surrendering his arsenal in exchange for foreign investment and aid (along with security-related concessions from the United States like formal recognition of his regime, a peace treaty ending the decades-long state of war between Pyongyang and its enemies). On the other hand, he might be more concerned about the impact of the sanctions that President Trump has both broadened and intensified.

Yet it was always difficult to believe that Kim would prize any of these considerations above his regime’s defense against overseas threats, and for these purposes, nuclear weapons are hard to beat. As widely noted, he’s surely been impressed by the gruesome fates of fellow autocrats who gave up their nuclear hopes (Libya’s Muammar el-Qaddafi) or who hadn’t the chance to develop these weapons (Iran’s Saddam Hussein).

Further, Kim also is no doubt aware of a third recent example of a country paying heavily for signing away its nuclear weapon status: Ukraine. In 1994, that nation agreed to dismantle the large nuclear force stationed on its soil when it was part of the Soviet Union, and left there after the USSR’s demise. In return, it received security promises from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia that its territorial integrity would be respected. A quarter century later, Moscow has seized effective control over much of the country’s eastern half.

Moreover, if a Trump-Kim summit and follow-on negotiations resulted in a compromise that left the North with some kind of nuclear arsenal, this “victory” could eventually become disastrous for America and its homeland. For there would be no guarantee that Kim would have truly abandoned his family’s goal of dominating the Korean peninsula through nuclear-aided conquest or intimidation of the South. And as long as large U.S. ground forces remained in South Korea, the outbreak of war would still threaten to draw Washington into a conflict with a foe capable of hitting its territory with nuclear warheads.

That still-live prospect should be an awfully powerful reason for switching to a strategy I’ve long advocated – ditching diplomacy, withdrawing the U.S. troops in South Korea that expose the United States to nuclear danger, and permitting North Korea’s neighbors to handle Kim and his nuclear ambitions any way they wish.

Trade diplomacy with China doesn’t threaten to turn an American city into a glowing ruin. But it’s all too likely to result in open-ended talks that do as little to combat the economic and security threats created by Beijing’s trade predation as previous negotiations involving President Trump’s predecessors. As I’ve recently written, even if his administration could come up with a coherent set of priorities, adequately verifying any Chinese compliance with U.S. positions is a pipe dream.

But this latest American attempt at trade diplomacy faces two other seemingly insuperable obstacles. First, the President’s objective of reducing the U.S.’ massive bilateral trade deficit with China appears to neglect the makeup of this deficit – which matters more than its size. Specifically, his proposals to date envision narrowing the trade gap mainly by boosting American exports of farm products and energy to China.

Both sectors of the U.S. economy are obviously important. But neither can become a major driver of sustainable American prosperity, because they’re essentially involved in producing commodities – which have never added nearly as much value to national economy as manufactures. That’s why developing countries invariably view a transition from agriculture to industry as the key to their hopes for rising living standards, and why even wealthy energy producers like Saudi Arabia have resolved to focus more on manufacturing and other higher value activities.

And P.S. – that’s no doubt why the Chinese clearly consider this American demand the most appealing on the Trump agenda.

As for the intertwined threats of continued and rampant Chinese intellectual property theft, and of China’s master plan to lead the world in a wide array of “industries of the future” (the Made in China 2025 program), U.S. tariffs on the goods and services these policies already enable Beijing to produce and export could well deal its ambitions a major blow. And clearly, that’s the Trump administration’s aim.

But if so, why negotiate over these matters? The United States has made reasonably clear what it wants China to do. And it’s declared its intent to retaliate with trade curbs if China balks. If the Trump administration is serious about this approach, and confident that it will succeed, what is there left to talk about? Either the Chinese accede (in which case, as I wrote this week, towering verification challenges would remain), or they dig in their heels and the tariffs follow.

Further talks, unless they’re simply aimed at clarifying American positions, can only muddy the waters and encourage endless Chinese foot-dragging – including regularly throwing Washington a few crumbs of market share – by telegraphing a Trump reluctance to pull the trigger. All the while, the Chinese tech prowess ostensibly alarming Americans across the political spectrum will keep growing.

And as with the case of the Korean crisis, a far better American approach would be disengagement – i.e., a series of measures aimed at reversing the disastrously wrongheaded twenty-year U.S. effort to more closely link the nation’s fate to a country with which mutually beneficial commerce was never possible. The Trump administration has already taken some important steps in this direction. Chiefly, it has greatly tightened restrictions on Chinese takeovers of economic assets in the United States. And the President’s threatened tariffs have induced some factories to move from China to the United States. But as previously indicated, the administration also seems bent on helping U.S. companies invest more in the Chinese economy, which can only further widen the trade deficit and hand China more cutting edge American technology. And it’s given no hint of a comprehensive strategy to bring manufacturing supply chains now concentrated in China back to the United States.

The latter task, in particular, will entail a long-term effort – not exactly the American governing system’s strong suit these days. And success will also depend on thoroughgoing domestic policy reform. (See this article for one sensible list.) But compared with the apparent belief that, over any policy-relevant time frame, China’s will become an economy compatible with America’s, it’s the height of realism.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Keeping an Eye on the North Korea Ball

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alliances, Kim Jong Un, North Korea, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, South Korea, Trump

It’s all too understandable that the stunning announcement of a possible summit between President Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un has triggered a torrent of comment and speculation about a series of critical details. And they’re all important, including:

>identifying the exact preconditions;

>figuring out how to verify that North Korea is abiding by them;

>determining whether more groundwork should have been laid at lower government levels by both sides before the leaders meet in person;

>evaluating whether Pyongyang’s interest in talks differs from previous such offers;

>more specifically, assessing whether Kim’s move stems from offensive considerations (like splitting the U.S.-South Korea alliance) or defensive (seeking relief from sanctions that may be starting to bite deeply);

>mapping out a strategy for talks assuming that the summit doesn’t produce a comprehensive agreement; and deciding how to foster genuine North Korean denuclearization.

Nonetheless, none of these issues should distract American leaders from what remains their overriding priority – realizing that the North’s major progress toward developing nuclear weapons that can strike the United States has fundamentally changed America’s paramount interest in the region.

As I’ve written in many previous posts, before Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program reached this stage, it was reasonable (though not without major dangers) for the United States to focus on deterring a North Korean conventional military attack on South Korea, and to stick tens of thousands of American troops in harm’s way on the peninsula to convince the North that any such move would trigger a devastating U.S. nuclear response. The simple reason: This strategy posed no risk to the American homeland.

Now that North Korea apparently is on the verge of being able credibly to threaten the United States with nuclear attack, America’s ongoing strategy is exposing the nation to one of the worst catastrophes imaginable, and for stakes that to me are impossible to justify – the security of a medium-sized country located halfway around the world. Unless you think Kim ultimately hopes to conquer all of East Asia, or bring it under his sway? Or even the Western Hemisphere?

That’s why I keep insisting that the only sensible move for the United States is to pull the troops out, let the wealthy, powerful countries of the region deal with North Korea however they wish, and thereby completely remove any plausible reason for Kim even to threaten nuclear weapons use against the United States, much less follow through if a conflict breaks out.

In fairness, the more serious threat evidently alarming supporters of the American policy status quo is that such a U.S. withdrawal from the scene is that Asia-Pacific countries lose faith in various U.S. defense guarantees it’s enjoyed for decades, look to China to rein in Kim and maintain peace and stability in the region, and let China write the rules for doing business in this economically dynamic area in ways that largely shut out America.

The obvious rejoinders are:

>It’s already excruciatingly difficult for many American companies and entire industries to compete satisfactorily in the region’s often highly protectionist economies – indeed, for decades, Washington has permitted these inequities to persist precisely out of the (bizarre) fear that pressing for genuinely free trade would antagonize these allies and protectorates; 

>whoever sets the framework for trade and other forms of commerce the region, most of its economies will need to access the U.S. market to sustain the exports that have fueled so much of their growth. So (as always) Washington will have all the leverage it needs in economic diplomacy, and will simply need to start using it; and

>however important economic interests are (and I’d be the last to belittle them), it’s unimaginable that, if the security of the entire nation is not at risk in a given situation (which it clearly need not be in the current Korean crisis), any American objectives even begin to compare with the imperative of preventing the nuclear destruction of any major U.S. cities. And if crucial American economic interests can only be protected satisfactorily by courting such nuclear risks, then the country urgently needs a new approach to economics and business.

Incidentally, the one aspect of the apparent (and we need to underscore the continuing uncertainties here) terms under which the summit will take place that deserves greater attention has to do with the seeming North Korean pledge to halt missile testing. I’ve worried that the summit and any subsequent talks could proceed while enabling the North to continue perfecting its nuclear capabilities. For example, despite North Korea’s apparent promise to halt all nuclear-related tests, it doesn’t seem possible to verify that Kim’s scientists have stopped trying to master challenges such as affixing a miniaturized nuclear warhead onto a missile (though reportedly, American intelligence officials believe they’re pretty darned close).

But a missile test freeze at this time does seem especially valuable, given how close Pyongyang appears to be to being able to deliver these weapons across oceans. More such testing is absolutely essential to creating a weapon that could accomplish this goal with high confidence, which presumably (though with North Korea, you never know) Kim would desperately want in a crisis. And verifying a test freeze is pretty easy. The missiles either come out of their silos or they don’t.

So since that’s the North Korea capability that the United States needs most to worry about by far, Pyongyang’s apparent commitment on this front could buy America valuable time. Nonetheless, nuclear risk would remain for the United States, and for reasons that no one taking seriously the principle of “America First” – or anyone other American with their head screwed on right – should tolerate. As a result, I’d still much rather wash America’s hands of this mess and let the locals deal with it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The 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.