Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Return of the Lippmann Gap?

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alliances, allies, Biden, burden sharing, China, defense budget, Democrats, Donald Trump, Europe, globalism, Japan, Lippmann Gap, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, progressives, Russia, soft power, South Korea, Walter Lippmann

No, it’s not the title of a newly discovered Philip Roth novel. Instead, the ”Lippmann Gap” is a phrase coined by scholars to describe the result of a country’s aims in foreign policy exceeding the means available to pursue them.

It was named after the twentieth century journalist, philosopher, and frequent adviser to leading politicians Walter Lippmann, who called attention to its frequency and dangers in his classic 1943 book, U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic. (P.S. In this post, I described a major flaw in Lippmann’s thinking, but he was right about the importance of establishing a sustainable relationship between a country’s ambitions and its ability to realize them.)

Troublingly for Americans, and for other countries that have long relied on the United States for protection, evidence has emerged that the gap could soon return in a big way under the Biden administration – whose principals, including the President, are typically described as diplomatic “adults in the room” making the welcome return to power after the dangerous tumult of the Trump years.

The evidence consists of reporting (see here and here) that the administration later this spring will submit a defense budget request that seeks no new funding over last year’s levels. Of course, this reporting may turn out to be inaccurate. Or the Biden-ites could still change their plans even if it is currently accurate. In addition, negotiations with Congress, which needs to approve these plans, could result in some increases.

Moreover, a flat defense budget request is by no means necessarily bad news for anyone, except for whichever defense contractors lose expected sales to the Pentagon. For example, the Defense Department has long been notorious for wasteful spending. And adopting different priorities, or more efficient weapons and other equipment, could well provide America and at least most of its allies with just as much “bang for the buck” as previously, as changing circumstances produce a shift in deployments from missions judged to have lost some of their importance to missions seen to have become more significant. In fact, I’ve long favored major cuts precisely because the nation spends way too much seeking objectives – like shoring up the defense of Western Europe – which haven’t been necessary in decades, and indeed in theory create greater dangers than they can address.

But there’s no reason to think that such considerations would be driving forces behind a reported Biden defense spending freeze, or near-freeze. And this is where the Lippmann Gap comes in. Because there’s every reason to believe that Mr. Biden intends to expand America’s foreign defense commitments on net, and because in at least one major reason of concern, the main potential enemy (China) keeps strengthening its militaty and has been acting more aggressively in recent years, and because a major object of China’s expansionist aims, Taiwan, has become the manufacturer of the world’s most advanced semiconductors – the computer chips that serve as the brains of an explosively growing number of civilian and defense-related products.

What other conclusions can one draw from the President’s repeated globalist assertions that “America is back,” and that in particular, it means to reassure allies around the world that allegedly become unnerved about U.S. reliability after four years of being (rightly, in my view) harangued by Trump attacks on their own skimpy defense spending, and threats to leave them in the lurch unless their alleged free-riding ends? (P.S. – not only weren’t these threats carried out, but as I noted in this article, in some noteworthy ways, the former President actually bolstered America’s alliance-related foreign military deployments.  Mr. Biden, meanwhile, has decided, at least for now, to let Europe’s members of NATO – the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance – Japan, and South Korea all off the burden-sharing hook, as made clear here, here, and here.)

Indeed, a flat or even reduced Biden defense budget request might come about in part from pressure from Democratic progressives to cut spending significantly. Fifty House members of his party have just urged him to reduce the defense budget “significantly.” And their rationale has nothing to do with the aforementioned potentially sensible reasons for cuts. Their case for a smaller U.S. military emphasizes that

“Hundreds of billions of dollars now directed to the military would have greater return if invested in diplomacy, humanitarian aid, global public health, sustainability initiatives, and basic research. We must end the forever wars, heal our veterans, and re-orient towards a holistic conception of national security that centers public health, climate change and human rights.”

I’m all for many of these particular aims, and also strongly support developing new definitions of national security and how to achieve and maintain it. But the Biden administration seems likeliest not to redefine national security significantly, but at most add these new domestic-oriented objectives on to the existing list of traditional goals. Therefore, if the progressives get even some of what they want, the effect inevitably would be to assume that “diplomacy, humanitarian aid, global public health, sustainability initiatives, and basic research” can substitute adequately for military force in carrying out an American foreign policy agenda that’s growing, not contracting.

Whether or not I believe this (I don’t), or you the individual reader believes, this is beside the point. U.S. adversaries seem unlikely to be impressed with these forms of what political scientists call “soft power.” Hence China keeps boosting its own military budget, and Russia responded to Obama administration Europe troops cuts by invading Crimea and attacking Ukraine.

U.S. allies are reacting skeptically, too. For example, European leaders evidently worry that Trump’s election revealed a strong popular U.S. desire to shed many global defense burdens that the Biden victory hasn’t eliminated. Therefore, there’s been increasing talk, anyway, in their ranks about reducing reliance on U.S. hard power by building up their own. And as I’ve repeatedly written, that would be great for Americans. But it’s sure not part of any Biden plans that have been made public.

A defense budget request fully reflecting the President’s bold “America is back” vow wouldn’t make me especially happy. But it would be far better than one that reopens or widens (depending on your views of current U.S. capabilities) a Lippmann Gap – and indicates to both domestic and global audiences that he really means to carry out globalism on the cheap.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Biden’s Aides Show How Not to Deal with China

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Alaska, Antony J. Blinken, Asia-Pacific, Barack Obama, Biden, China, Donald Trump, global norms, globalism, Hong Kong, human rights, Indo-Pacific, international law, Jake Sullivan, liberal global order, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Reinhold Niebuhr, sanctions, Serenity Prayer, South China Sea, Taiwan, tariffs, tech, Trade, Uighurs, United Nations, Yang Jiechi

You knew (at least I did) that America’s top foreign policy officials were going to step in it when they led off their Alaska meeting yesterday with Chinese counterparts by describing U.S. policy toward the People’s Republic as first and foremost a globalist exercise in strengthening “the rules-based international order” rather than protecting and advancing Americas’ own specific national interests.

This emphasis on the part of Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan simultaneously made clear that they had no clue on how to communicate effectively to the Chinese or about China’s own aims, and – as was worrisomely true for the Obama administration in which both served – unwittingly conveyed to Beijing that they were more concerned about dreaming up utopian global arrangements than about dealing with the United States’ own most pressing concerns in the here and now.

It’s true that, in his opening remarks at the public portion of yesterday’s event that Blinken initially refered to advancing “the interests of the United States.” But his focus didn’t stay there for long. He immediately pivoted to contending:

“That system is not an abstraction. It helps countries resolve differences peacefully, coordinate multilateral efforts effectively and participate in global commerce with the assurance that everyone is following the same rules. The alternative to a rules-based order is a world in which might makes right and winners take all, and that would be a far more violent and unstable world for all of us. Today, we’ll have an opportunity to discuss key priorities, both domestic and global, so that China can better understand our administration’s intentions and approach.”

Where, however, has been the evidence over…decades that China views the contemporary world as one in which peaceful resolution of differences is standard operating procedure, much less desirable? That multilateral efforts are worth coordinating effectively? That might shouldn’t make right and that China shouldn’t “take all” whenever it can?

Even more important, where is the evidence that China views what globalists like Blinken view as a system to be legitimate in the first place? Indeed, Yang Jiechi, who in real terms outranks China’s foreign minister as the country’s real foreign affairs czar, countered just a few minutes later by dismissing Blinken’s “so-called rules-based international order” as a selfish concoction of “a small number of countries.” He specifically attacked it for enabling the United States in particular to “excercise long-arm jurisdiction and suppression” and “overstretch the national security through the use of force or financial hegemony….”

Shortly afterwards, he added, “I don’t think the overwhelming majority of countries in the world would recognize…that the rules made by a small number of people would serve as the basis for the international order.”

Yang touted as a superior alternative “the United Nations-centered international system and the international order underpinned by international law.” But of course, even if you swallow this Chinese line (and you shouldn’t), it’s been precisely that system’s universality, and resulting need to pretend the existence of an equally universal consensus on acceptable behavior and good faith on the part of all members, that’s resulted in its general uselessness.

Meanwhile, surely striking Beijing as both cynical and utterly hollow were Blinken’s efforts to justify U.S. criticisms of China’s human rights abuses as threats to “the rules-based order that maintains global stability. That’s why they’re not merely internal matters and why we feel an obligation to raise these issues here today.”

After all, whatever any decent person thinks of Beijing’s contemptible crackdown in Hong Kong, arguably genocidal campaigns against the Uighur minority, and brutally totalitarian system generally, what genuinely serious person could believe that the United States, or other democracies, had any intention or capability of halting these practices?

What might have made an actually useful, and credible, impression on the Chinese from a U.S. standpoint would have been blunt declarations that (a) Beijing’s saber-rattling toward (global semiconductor manufacturing leader) Taiwan and sealanes-jeopardizing expansionism in the South China Sea, and cyber-attacks were major threats to American security and prosperity that the United States would keep responding to with all means necessary; and (b) that Washington would continue using a full-range of tariffs and sanctions against predatory Chinese economic practices as long as they continued harming U.S. businesses and their employees. That is, Blinken and Sullivan should have emphasized Chinese actions that hurt and endanger Americans – and against which in the economic sphere, Donald Trump’s policies showed Washington could make a significant difference.

It’s possible that in the private sessions, President Biden’s emissaries will dispense with the grandstanding and zero in on the basics. (Although that shift would raise the question of why this approach was deemed unsuitable for the public.) But the Biden-ites weirdly advertised in advance that China’s economic abuses and the technology development threat it poses wouldn’t be U.S. priorities at any stage of the Alaska meetings.

In the mid-20^th century, American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr popularized (although probably didn’t write) a devotion called the “Serenity Prayer” whose famous first lines read “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” I’m hoping someone puts copies into Blinken’s and Sullivan’s briefcases for their flight back from Alaska.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Is Biden Going Trump-y on Russia and Ukraine?

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Adam Schiff, alliances, Atlantic Council, Biden, China, Democrats, Donald Trump, energy, Frederick Kempe, Germany, globalism, impeachment, natural gas, Nord Stream 2, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin

Something weird’s going on with the Biden administration, Ukraine, and Russia, and it could eventually put lots of Democrats in an awfully awkward position.

I’m old enough to remember when helping the eastern European country maintain its independence against Russia’s aggression was considered so important by leading Democrats, along with U.S. foreign policy establishmentarians, that it justified impeaching Donald Trump. For allegedly he illegally slow-walked Congressionally approved military aid to the Ukrainians – allegedly because he wanted to force Ukraine’s government to help him dig up political dirt on then soon-to-be Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

As a result, for months, Americans heard again and again how critical Ukraine’s security was to America’s own security, and how Trump’s actions therefore endangered U.S. national security. In the words of lead House impeachment trial manager Adam Schiff (D-California):

“[T]he military aid that we provide, Ukraine helps to protect and advance American national security interests in the region and beyond. America has an abiding interest in stemming Russian expansionism and resisting any nation’s efforts to remake the map of Europe by dent of military force, even as we have tens of thousands of troops stationed there. Moreover, as one witness put it during our impeachment inquiry, the United States aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there and we don’t have to fight Russia here.”

Mr. Biden has never gone quite this far in public, either as former President Obama’s vice presidential point man on Ukraine, as presidential candidate, or as chief executive himself. Nonetheless, he continually pressed his former boss to provide more and better weapons to the Ukrainians than Obama was willing to approve, indicating he, too, considered Ukraine’s security closely related to America’s own.

Indeed, last year, his campaign issued a statement declaring that “Ukraine’s success will contribute to a more stable and secure Europe, which is in America’s interest.”

More recently, however, President Biden has been sending out significantly different signals. For example, his statement last month marking the seventh anniversary of Russia’s “illegal invasion of Ukraine,” he pledged to “stand with Ukraine against Russia’s aggressive acts” and condemned Moscow for violating “international law, the norms by which modern countries engage one another,” but didn’t draw any direct connections between Ukraine’s fate and America’s.

More concretely, Mr. Biden has been looking pretty slow-walking-ly himself on an issue vital to Ukraine’s prosperity: preventing Russia and Germany from completing a natural gas pipeline that would bypass that country, deprive it of billions of dollars worth annually in badly needed revenues from transit fees from existing pipelines across its own territory, heighten its vulnerability to Russian gas blackmail (as candidate Biden noted himself last year), and increase Europe’s energy dependence on Vladimir Putin’s regime to boot. His press secretary has called the Nord Stream 2 project a “bad deal for Europe.” But the project is nearly finished, and his administration isn’t displaying much urgency. As State Department spokesperson Ned Price told reporters blandly, “we are always looking at pipeline activity that would be sanctionable, so if we see activity that meets that threshold we are prepared to follow the law.”

Not that the administration doesn’t have some good reasons for caution on the Nord Stream 2 project. After all, improving relations with allies like Germany, which were strained by Trump’s “transactional” approach, is a top Biden priority.

Perhaps more important, and revealing, Mr. Biden might be reacting to signs of ever closer ties between Russia and China, since responding to the latter’s rise and increasingly aggressive behavior is also a U.S. priority now. Indeed, just last weekend, leading think tanker Frederick Kempe, whose Atlantic Council sees the world in precisely the kinds of globalist ways as the President, cited growing Sino-Russian cooperation as one reason for America moving away from an indiscriminately anti-Moscow hard line to “a more strategic approach” that would “combine more attractive elements of engagement with more sophisticated forms of containment alongside partners.”

During his first presidential campaign, Trump responded to complaints about his supposedly excessive and even corrupting regard for Russia by asking “If we could get along with Russia, wouldn’t that be a good thing, instead of a bad thing?” and noting possible benefits like defeating ISIS jihadists in the Middle East. No remotely comparable statement has come from the Biden administration, but its deeds on the Ukraine-Russia front are starting to send a similar message. Expect the silence from the Democrats’ ostensible Ukraine hawks and Russia hawks to be deafening.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: An America Last Troop Agreement with South Korea

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alliances, allies, Biden, China, Cold War, deterrence, Donald Trump, Japan, North Korea, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, South Korea, Soviet Union, tripwire

The United States and South Korea have negotiated an agreement on sharing the cost of basing U.S. troops on the peninsula, and the outcome raises the question of why the Biden administration bothered to negotiate in the first place. For the agreement simply endorsed the offer made by the Koreans under the Trump administration. In fact, it clearly signaled to America’s other security allies that under Mr. Biden, the United States will revert to its pre-Trump policies of permitting them to skimp on outlays for their own defense, thereby needlessly exposing the American homeland to the risk of nuclear attack by the adversaries these alliances are supposed to resist.

Let’s begin by remembering why the link between these decades-old alliances and nuclear risk exist in the first place. As I’ve written repeatedly (and most comprehensively here), it resulted from an early-Cold War period American decision to give up on the hugely expensive idea of using U.S. conventional military forces to deter threats posed by the old Soviet Union, China, and North Korea, and rely instead on intimidating these foes by brandishing nuclear swords.

Non-nuclear U.S. forces, however, still played a vital role in this strategy. Their purpose was serving as “tripwires.” It was the prospect of their being destroyed by their superior enemies that was deemed likely to spur U.S. Presidents to use the nukes to save them, and creating the prospect of escalation to full-scale, intercontinental nuclear exchanges that would prevent the initial aggression to begin with.

Of course, if such deterrence failed, and a full-scale nuclear war broke out, the U.S. homeland would probabl become a casualty. But in those days, the gambit wasn’t completely crazy. In the first place, the security of the allies being protected (mainly Western Europe and Japan) was arguably vital to America’s own security. In the second place, for most of the Cold War, the United States possessed either a nuclear monopoly over the potential adversaries, a meaningful edge, or parity. And even the latter was considered adequate to keep the nuclear retaliation threat credible. In the third place, during the early Cold War decades, the allies – all of which were devastated by World War II – simply couldn’t mount serious defenses of their own.

These days, though, the alliances situation has changed dramatically. Most of the allies can still be considered vital assets for the United States. And all of them are now wealthy enough to build militaries capable of self-defense. But they choose not to, preferring instead to rely on those American military tripwires to deter attack and use their national resources elsewhere, thereby ensuring the continuing nuclear threat to the United States.

Significantly, the major ally that always and still has the least significance to America’s safety and well-being has been South Korea. In addition, the ally-adversary wealth gap is clearly widest between South Korea and its economically impoverished, Stalinist northern neighbor. But because of Seoul’s defense free-riding, because North Korea now has built an impressive nuclear arsenal and is nearing the capability of reaching the continental United States with its missiles, and because not even the alliance-skeptical Trump administration elected to remove the tripwire and thus eliminate any reason for North Korea to threaten, much less actually strike, U.S. targets, the alliance-related nuclear danger to America remains and (given North Korea’s unpredictability, could well be greatest) where running this risk is least justifiable.

Not that the Trumpers ignored the situation completely. Before his administration began, the former President did reveal some awareness of alliance-related nuclear security problems – especially in Asia. And although this theme quickly vanished from the list of stated Trump alliance concerns, he did vigorously press all the major allies, including South Korea, to boost their military budgets and pay more of the costs of hosting U.S. forces. In fact, during his term, the former President continued his pre-inauguration threats to remove some of the American forces from South Korea in order to turn up the heat on Seoul. (He actually ordered a troop drawdown from Germany for the same reasons).

The allies – including South Korea – and their enthusiasts in the bipartisan globalist U.S. foreign policy establishment predictably cried “foul,” contending that Trump had turned American alliance policy into a base exercise in “transactionalism” and “shakedowns,” and none more loudly than candidate Joe Biden last year. In an October op-ed for a South Korean new agency he made clear his determination to return to pre-Trump coddling regardless of the nuclear risk to his own country.

“As President,” he promised, “I’ll stand with South Korea, strengthening our alliance to safeguard peace in East Asia and beyond, rather than extorting Seoul with reckless threats to remove our troops.”

And unfortunately for anyone who would put America’s security first, he’s been true to his word. The latest agreement specifying South Korea’s payment level for the 28,500 American troops stationed in harm’s way right up against the Demilitarized Zone that divides the peninsula had run out in 2019. Deadlocking the talks since then had been Trump’s insistience that Seoul roughly quintuple its last agreed-on figure of about $920 million annually to about $5 billion, and consent to renegotiating the amounts each year rather than every five years. (One news account reported that this demand didn’t come from Trump himself, and that the administration eventually decided to call for a 50 percent first-year hike.)

Biden’s solution? Secure a marginal increase from 13 percent to 13.9 percent in the last annual payments offer reportedly made by South Korea. Thereafter, Seoul will boost its yearly contributions at the same rate as it increases its defense budget – which of course by definition remains woefully inadequate, since despite some recent military spending progress clearly spurred by America First-fueled anxieties, it would still require South Korea to depend on American support. (Incidentally, different accounts of the exact terms have been reported here and here.)

The result? The South Koreans are happy that the Biden administration is dealing with them in “ mutually beneficial and rational manner” and not in “a transactional fashion.” A State Department spokesperson was tickled that the deal has kept the “Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment to reinvigorating and modernizing our democratic alliances around the word to advance our shared security and prosperity.” The Mainstream Media’s globalism cheerleaders are impressed that Mr Biden is farsightedly willing to “cut allies a break to build unity in competition against China and Russia.”

And Americans are still one temper tantrum by Kim Jong Un away from either sitting by and watching nearly 30,000 of their soldiers overrun in an invasion, or trying to save them from total destruction and South Korea from armed conquest with nuclear attacks that could bring a North Korean warhead down on a major American city…or two…or three.

P.S. All indications are that the Biden administration is going to stage a rerun with Japan – though as indicated above, this ally is at least more important than South Korea.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Why U.S.-China Tech Decoupling Needs to be Kept Simple

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AI, artificial intelligence, Biden, Biden administration, China, decoupling, National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, tech, technology

“Let’s you and him fight” is about the best expression of cynicism I know of. It’s also often great advice when dealing with a law-of-the-jungle-type situation like world affairs, where advancing your country’s interests without incurring much or any risk is a tactic that’s hard to beat.

As a formula for America’s response to the threat posed by China’s advances in artficial intelligence (AI), though? It’s completely unacceptable because it inevitably results in some portions of the population or the economy or the society or all three making all or most of any sacrifices needed to achieve an important national goal, and others getting off scot free or close to it.

And that’s a big problem with an otherwise very valuable new report from a federal government advisory committee on Chinese progress in this game-changing technology. On the one hand, the authors do a great job in explaining why permitting to narrow America’s lead in AI any further could be disaster for national security and prosperity, and for freedom around the world. As a result, they compellingly argue, grappling with this reality requires “comprehensive, whole-of-nation action.”

On the other hand, although they insist on a massive mobilization of U.S. energy and resources, they also maintain that “The United States can compete against China without ending collaborative AI research and severing all technology commerce.” Not only does this position make no sense whatever, given the Chinese ambitions for AI supremacy the Commission describes and the consequences of Chinese victory. It also means, conveniently, that the U.S. tech sector – from which many of the commissioners come – can keep making big bucks doing business with China.

More fundamentally, though, even if this square-circling policy framework wasn’t so sure to keep lining the pockets of many of the authors, it would still suffer from the intrinsically paralyzing qualities of the idea of “competition” as a guide to or aim for America’s approach to China. Simply put, the idea of competition is simply too complicated.

If you consider this perspective too cynical, or too dogmatic, or both, check out the following from the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence:

According to the commissioners, AI is more than “a single technology breakthrough” or even “general-purpose technology.” It nothing less than a “field of fields” that “holds the secrets which will reorganize the life of the world.’” And not surprisingly, “America’s military rivals are integrating AI concepts and platforms to challenge the United States’ decades-long technology advantage. We will not be able to defend against AI-enabled threats without ubiquitous AI capabilities and new warfighting paradigms.”

That’s because “AI applications will help militaries prepare, sense and understand, decide, and execute faster and more efficiently. Numerous weapon systems will leverage one or more AI technologies. AI systems will generate options for commanders and create battle networks connecting systems across all domains.”

Chief among these AI-progressing rivals is China, which the report says “possesses the might, talent, and ambition to surpass the United States as the world’s leader in AI in the next decade if current trends do not change.”

Specicifally, “China sees AI as the path to offset U.S. conventional military superiority by ‘leapfrogging’ to a new generation of technology. Its military has embraced ‘intelligentized war’––investing, for example, in swarming drones to contest U.S. naval supremacy. China’s military leaders talk openly about using AI systems for ‘reconnaissance, electromagnetic countermeasures and coordinated firepower strikes.’ China is testing and training AI algorithms in military games designed around real-world scenarios.”

Nor would Chinese AI superiority pose military threats alone:

“Authoritarian regimes will continue to use AI-powered face recognition, biometrics, predictive analytics, and data fusion as instruments of surveillance, influence, and political control. China’s use of AI-powered surveillance technologies to repress its Uyghur minority and monitor all of its citizens foreshadows how authoritarian regimes will use AI systems to facilitate censorship, track the physical movements and digital activities of their citizens, and stifle dissent. The global circulation of these digital systems creates the prospect of a wider adoption of authoritarian governance.”

Further, its AI push is such a priority for China that it’s determined to succeed by hook or by crook. The Commission reports that Beijing “is executing a centrally directed systematic plan to extract AI knowledge from abroad through espionage, talent recruitment, technology transfer, and investments.” Also crucial to China’s strategy: It “continues to pervasively steal American IP-protected technological advances through varied means like cyber hacking of businesses and research institutes, technological espionage, blackmail, and illicit technology transfer.”

Yet the AI report also observes that “The U.S.-China competition is complicated by the complex web of supply chains, research partnerships, and business relationships that link the world’s two AI leaders. Dramatic steps to sever these ties could be costly for Americans and reverberate across the world. The relationships between American and Chinese academics, innovators, and markets are deep, often mutually beneficial, and help advance the field of AI. Moreover, it remains in the U.S. national interest to leverage formal diplomatic dialogue about AI and other emerging technologies and to explore areas for cooperative AI projects that will benefit humanity.”

Worse, “Broad-based technological decoupling with China could deprive U.S. universities and companies of scarce AI and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) talent, sever American companies’ efficient supply chains, and cut off access to markets and capital for innovative firms.”

Therefore, the report expresses confidence that “The United States can compete against China without ending collaborative AI research and severing all technology commerce” and that America’s goal regarding China should be “targeted disentanglement as just one element of its overall approach, which, if applied judiciously to key sectors, can help build U.S. technological resilience, reduce threats from illicit technology transfer, and protect national security–critical sectors.”

The Commission even goes so far as to recommend establishing “a high-level U.S.-China Comprehensive Science & Technology dialogue” that would

>”Identify targeted areas of cooperation on emerging technologies to solve global challenges such as climate change and natural disaster relief; and

>Provide a forum to air a discrete set of concerns around specific uses of emerging technologies while building relationships and establishing processes between the two nations.”

Unquestionably, seeking this balance and these mutual gains is appealing in theory, and it would certainly create the best of all possible worlds for U.S. tech companies that profit hugely from their current business with China and clearly envision much more to come, but whose every existence is threatened by the aforementioned predatory Chinese policies. But there’s no reason to believe that this panglossian result can actually be achieved.

In the first place, the report claims that “China’s campaign to explit U.S.-based research violates the research community’s core principles of integrity, openness, accountability, and fairness.”  That doesn’t sound like a terrific basis for mutually beneficial AI cooperation to me. 

Second, as the Commissioners note, “AI is the quintessential ‘dual use’ technology—it can be used for civilian and military purposes. The AI promise—that a machine can perceive, decide, and act more quickly, in a more complex environment, with more accuracy than a human—represents a competitive advantage in any field. It will be employed for military ends, by governments and non-state groups.”

In effect, they’re acknowledging that even the most seemingly benign AI progress fostered by Sino-American cooperation can and will be used by China for military and other threatening ends. It’s true that the reverse could hold, too. But who’s willing to take the chance that the Chinese would be as generous sharing any knowhow that could be used against it as the United States will be? And who seriously believes that a lobby-friendly Washington could exercise the kind of control over U.S. technologists that the dictators in Beijing will exercise over their Chinese counterparts – assuming that scientists and companies with long histories of enthusiastic voluntary tech transfer to China will end or even curb these activities outside this official dialogue setting?

And above and beyond these dual-use complications, the notion that the United States can successfully compartmentalize its China AI and broader tech policies so precisely and expertly seems bound to create a rerun of America’s approach to date. Even under the Trump administration, the diversity of interests and voices that inevitably shape decisions in a pluralistic, democratic U.S.-style political system kept blurring and otright undermining Washington’s focus. The product has long been much more incoherence and half-at-best-measures than either effective checks on China’s power or strong commitments to the kinds of government- and economy-wide tech promotion that’s rightly urged by this Commission – and by many others before it.

In other words, even years after China’s malign intentions became clear to a critical mass of American political and business leaders, they’ve continued to permit bilateral ties (in the Commission’s words) to be “complicated by [a] complex web of supply chains, research partnerships, and business relationships….” In turn, that’s the main reason why, to quote the report again, “The U.S. government is not prepared to defend the United States in the coming artificial intelligence (AI) era.”

In a previous post, I criticized the Biden administration for describing the U.S.-China relationship as a competition because the term is

“so intrinsically ambivalent (especially in the realm of world affairs) that its much likelier to confuse than to provide useful policy guidance. In addition, competition is a concept that evokes the playing field, where both victory and defeat have ultimately trivial consequences, rather than the fundamentally anarchic and much more dangerous international landscape. Consequently, its use tends to downplay even stakes otherwise defined more threateningly.”

This AI report greatly adds to the evidence that treating America’s dealings with China as a competition (including President Biden’s latest version: an “extreme competition”) can only lead Washington down a dangerous dead-end. It’s effectively contending that, even though China literally is seeking the United States’ defeat and domination, it’s still interested in helping Americans cure cancer or save the world from climate change, and that therefore current U.S. policy need only a large number essentially tweaks to keep safeguarding national security and prosperity adequately. And it assumes that American policymakers are skilled enough to achieve the needed “calibration” of rivalry and cooperation. (Watch this term turn into a favorite of U.S. officials and pundits – especially the globalists – going forward.)

I’m much more impressed with former boxing champion Mike Tyson’s observation that “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” In other words, what looks great on the drawing board – or on the word processor – tends to fall apart when it confronts reality.

The lesson to be learned isn’t that planning and strategizing isn’t necessary. Instead, it’s that particularly in high-stakes situations, the conceptually simplest plan will likely be the best. When it comes to the China challenge, including  artificial intelligence interactions between the two countries, that means spending much less time trying to thread needles, and more time figuring out how to shut down the transfer of superior U.S. knowhow to China as completely as possible.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: It’s Official. Uncle Sucker is Back

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alliances, allies NATO, America First, Biden, deterrence, Donald Trump, Japan, North Atlantic treaty Organization, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, South Korea

If you think this title is too harsh, and especially if you agree with his view that maintaining U.S. alliances must be central to American foreign policy-making, you need to ask yourself this: How can some of the major points President Biden made in his speech Friday to an audience containing heads of major allied governments accomplish anything but keep the United States needlessly paying outsized costs for these arrangements and even worse, running major risks that include nuclear attack, for no good reason whatever?

As known by RealityChek regulars, downsides of American security alliances both in Europe and Asia that arguably were acceptable during much of the Cold War period have become terrifying and – because stemming from stubbornly hidebound thinking and consequent policy inertia – downright inexcusable more recently. That’s because physically devastated allies literally helpless against aggression in the earliest post-World War II decades, but nonetheless retaining vital economic and therefore military potential, had fully recovered by the mid-1970s, and because their continued defense free-riding led Washington to station sizable military units (and their dependents) directly in harm’s way.

The idea was that this U.S. presence’s very vulnerability to superior conventional forces from the Soviet Union and North Korea would deter aggression to begin with. Forit would all but force a U.S. President to approve saving these American lives with nuclear weapons – whose use could trigger an all-out mutually devastating conflict.

This gamble could be defended when the United States enjoyed clearcut nuclear superiority over the Soviets, a nuclear monopoly and near-monopoly over the North Koreans and Chinese, respectively – and when allies and their potentially crucial assets were still down and out. But for many years, the nuclear gap has  closed in Europe and the the monopoly and near-monopoly in Asia vanished, and all allies in question have been amply wealthy enough to defend themselves. So Washington’s refusal to adjust means that the nation could well see nuclear warheads land on its soil because the Europeans, Japanese, and South Koreans have been permitted to be military deadbeats. Could any policy be more recklessly perverse, or determined to reward irresponsibility and cynicism?

Despite loudly griping about allied defense free-riding, raising the temperature in periodic defense burden-sharing negotiations, and rearranging some troop deployments in Europe, Donald Trump never frontally and comprehensively challenged the status quo, at least while President. Would a second term have been different? Who knows?

What is clear, especially from this latest speech by Mr. Biden, is that the United States will now be doubling down on this entire literal Americans Last strategy.

For not only did the President repeated the pre-Trump standard Washington endorsement of the core principle of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that “An attack on one is an attack on all. That is our unshakable vow” – which inevitably tells the allies that they can continue free-riding militarily to their heart’s content and count on American protection no matter how potentially disastrous the consequences for the American people.

He actually praised “Europe’s growing investment in the military capabilities that enable our shared defense” even though these expenditure will be definition be utterly inadequate as long as their level leaves a military gap that American conventional and nuclear forces still need to fill.

Further, in declaring that he would not view U.S. alliances as “transactional” he assured America’s so-called partners that their relationships with Washington need involve no give and take whatever, thereby guaranteeing that these opportunistic governments would raise their chronic free-riding to much loftier levels, and that Americans would bear more of the costs and risks of these arrangements than ever.

And most foolishly of all, Mr. Biden explicitly told the Europeans (and consequently the Asians) that, after the stormy Trump years, it was up to the United States “to earn back our position of trusted leadership.” That is, the kinds (long overdue) burden- and therefore risk-sharing criticisms made by the former President were completely illegitimate, and that whatever ailed the alliances resulted from Trump’s America First words and (much more modest) deeds, not from decades of allied risk- and burden-shirking.

Of course, Mr. Biden’s words were actual U.S. policy for decades before the Trump years. That’s why these arrangements became so dysfunctional from any sensible American standpoint in the first place. But by making this approach explicit, and giving the Europeans and Asians official license for their longstanding “heads we win, tails America loses” priorities, the President has not only gravely weakened his own country’s safety and prosperity. He’s destroyed whatever legitimate hopes ever existed that multilateralism and collective security could ever adequately serve any reasonable definition of American interests.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Mr. President, U.S. Dealings with China are No Game

Tags

alliances, allies, Antony Blinken, Asia-Pacific, Biden, China, Cold War, democracy, Donald Trump, Indo-Pacific, Jake Sullivan, Kurt M. Campbell, national interests, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Soviet Union

For literally decades, American foreign policy makers, and especially the pre-Trump globalists, fell into the dangerous habit of obsessing about second-order questions (like whether the old Soviet Union was a fundamentally aggressive or defensively-oriented power, whether military force or diplomacy was the nation’s most effective foreign policy tool, whether unilateral or multilateral actions were most likely to succeed, and whether a more or less involvement in world affairs was preferable).

As a result, they typically neglected the paramount first-order questions: Principally, what overseas goals does the United States need to achieve to secure adequate levels of safety and well-being? In other words, which foreign objectives matter decisively for the United States in and of themselves, and which don’t? And those are first-order question because assessing others’ intentions is much more guesswork than science, and because no one can sensibly choose tools for a job without knowing what job they want to do.

(See this 1985 FOREIGN POLICY essay and this 1991 Atlantic Monthly article on the general failure of not only American leaders but of presumed foreign policy experts to think rigorously about national interests. See this 1991 New York Times piece about the hazards of divining intentions as opposed to capabilities. Apologies if the first two are no longer available for free on-line.)

Therefore, it’s awfully depressing to see the Biden administration staging its own version of backwards strategizing. It’s evidently determined to base its China policy on figuring out what kind of relationship it wants with the People’s Republic, and paying much less attention to identifying specific actions the United States wants China to take, stop, and refrain from in the first place.

The Biden approach is completely mistaken for two main reasons. First, whenever relationships are pursued regardless of their impact on particular, concrete interests, these national needs and wants inevitably become subordinated to atmospherics and abstractions and processes – a decidedly unpromising recipe for national success.

Second, the particular relationship on which President Biden and his top aides are focusing – one marked by competition – is so intrinsically ambivalent (especially in the realm of world affairs) that its much likelier to confuse than to provide useful policy guidance. In addition, competition is a concept that evokes the playing field, where both victory and defeat have ultimately trivial consequences, rather than the fundamentally anarchic and much more dangerous international landscape. Consequently, its use tends to downplay even stakes otherwise defined more threateningly.

These obstacles to clear foreign policy thinking and numerous others all rear their heads in statements the new President and his leading advisers have made during the campaign and transition, and since Inauguration Day.

For instance, Jake Sullivan and Kurt M. Campbell, who have become, respectively, Mr. Biden’s White House national security adviser and National Security Council “czar” for the Asia-Pacific region, perceptively noted in a prominent 2019 article that terms used by the Trump administration like “strategic competition,” unless elaborated on, can’t help but connote “uncertainty about what that competition is over and what it means to win.”

They did write of the need to decide what “kinds of interests the United States wants to secure.” And they do dance around some specific objectives, like maintaining unimpeded navigation in Asia-Pacific (or, to use a term more expanive and popular lately because it includes India – “Indo-Pacific”) waters, and preventing China from taking over Taiwan, and safeguarding America’s global technology leadership. 

But the authors also drone on and on about achieving a state of coexistence that “would involve elements of competition and cooperation, with the United States’ competitive efforts geared toward securing those favorable terms” (but never absolutely committed to securing them); and about “accepting competition as a condition to be managed rather than a problem to be solved”; and about how the Chinese competitive challenge differs from its Cold War-era Soviet counterpart; and about how China has become an “essential partner” as well as a formidable competitor with the United States because of the appearance of shared global dangers like climate change and pandemics; and about an “emerging” global contest of social and economic models; and about how to “get the balance between competition and cooperation right.” Indeed, the piece is titled “Competition Without Catastrophe.”

In addition, last year, new Secretary of State Antony Blinken took pains in a lengthy interview to emphasize that although “we are in competition with China,” there’s “nothing wrong with competition if it’s fair” That point is entirely valid in the context of a sporting event, a spelling bee, or other forms of competition with relatively trivial consequences.

At best, however, it’s deeply puzzling when dealing with decisions that can bring either great benefit or harm to an entire nation, and that can create major risks and require massive expenditures of national blood and treasure. In cases where winning and losing matter considerably and even vitally, it should be obvious, that prevailing or figuring out how to cope with defeat are worth the candle. Yet if and when it’s the fairness of the outcome that matters most rather than the outcome itself, why bother competing at all? Worse, these efforts can produce inexcusable wastes of resources that will surely be invaluable in the more important situations sure to come somewhere down the line.

In one instance reminiscent of the Cold War thinking they generally criticize in the China context, Campbell and Sullivan write that winning that competition of social and economic models with Beijing counts significantly because the United States (in unspecified ways to be sure) will be much better off in a world mainly made up of free market democracies than in one dominated by countries that try to emulate China’s totalitarianism.

Their point is fortified by the leading role advanced surveillance systems play in China, which additionally means that the United States must stay ahead in these fields both in order to ensure military superiority when push comes to shove, and to defend itself against Chinese cyber-aggression. Moreover, intuition and common decency lead all Americans to root for the widest possible global triumph of political and economic freedom (realizing of course that the latter can be defined in many different ways).

Even here, though, the framing U.S. strategy as a competition with China can complicate as many choices as it clarifies. For example, a defining principle of Biden foreign policy is that, in the President’s words, “America’s alliances are our greatest asset” in world affairs. Yet if so, then the new administration, as with its Cold War predecessors, will need to recognize that many of its current and desired partners won’t be either political or economic democracies or even close (in Asia, Communist-ruled Vietnam and the quasi-at-best democracies of Thailand and the Philippines come to mind), and that today’s genuine democracies often feel free – as during the Cold War – to ignore or actually undermine U.S. interests (like Germany nowadays regarding both China and Russia).

Finally, it’s all too easy to conclude that the Biden-ites’ focus on second-order questions first and foremost represents a series of word games aimed at masking their inability or unwillingness to identify first-order issues. Take the President’s insistence that he’ll carry out an “extreme competition” with China. Even leaving aside that he immediately proceeded to trivialize the term by declaring that his approach will differ from Donald Trump’s by focusing on “international rules of the road” (another second-order priority), what exactly will be “extreme”? And how does his definition of extreme competition compare with the other varieties of competition detailed by Sullivan and Campbell?

Similarly, Blinken has just ventured that the U.S. relationship with China entails “adversarial,” “competitive,” and “cooperative” aspects. The last category is no mystery. But what’s the difference between the first and the second? Does the first refer to American interests that must be advanced or defended at all costs and risks, or at least major costs and risks? Does the second refer to those situations and interactions where fairness is overriding? 

Sullivan and Blinken in particular admit that they used to belong to the dangerously naive China engagement mainstream of the U.S. foreign and economic policy communities.  But until they, their colleagues, and the President stop talking about the China challenge as if it was a game, ample doubt will be justified as to whether they’ve yet become China realists.           

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Globalists Keep Rejecting Key Tenets of Globalism

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America First, Biden, Council on Foreign Relations, Donald Trump, foreign policy establishment, globalism, international institutions, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Richard N. Haass

As well known by RealityChek regulars, there’s not much I enjoy more professionally speaking than finding figures with whom I normally strongly disagree on key economic and foreign policy issues unwittingly agreeing with me on the concepts at the heart of these disagreements. (See, e.g., here and here.)

So imagine how pleased I was to see this paragraph in a recent opinion column by Richard N. Haass – a foreign policy establishmentarian if ever there was one, and therefore a leading advocate of the globalist approach to world affairs that I and Donald Trump (in his typically ragged way) believe has been needlessly and indeed recklessly risky and costly for Americans:

“The US will…encounter difficulty in realizing its goal of organizing the world to meet global challenges, from infectious disease and climate change to nuclear proliferation and conduct in cyberspace. There is no consensus and no international community, and the US can neither compel others to act as it wants nor succeed on its own.”

It’s a statement that’s noteworthy not only because it recognizes the fatal flaw of one of globalism’s central pillars – fetishizing international cooperation and therefore striving to systematize and formalize such multilateralism by building strong global institutions. For the point being made by Haass – a former official in the pre-Trump Republican presidencies and now President of the Council on Foreign Relations, often described as the foreign policy establishment’s epicenter – is that creating organizations can’t be equated with solving even problems shared by the entire world because – across the board – so many different countries disagree on the best solutions.

It’s also statement that’s noteworthy because Haass had previously called the rejection of multilateralism and its constituent institutions a defining and especially wrongheaded feature of Trump’s America First-ism. Withdrawal from such arrangements, Haass wrote just last May, has been

“central to the Trump presidency. He has pulled the country out of every manner of multilateral agreement and institution overseas in the name of going it alone. Going it alone, though, makes little sense in a world increasingly defined by global challenges that can best be met through collective, not individual, action.”

But Haass’ new about-face is consequential as welI because it’s essence’ is identical with my own previously stated (anti-globalist) view that

“Precisely because…domestic [political] systems are characterized by a common acceptance of legitimate authority, and by a broader sense of mutual obligation, a true [foreign policy] realist would never disagree that their possibilities for ‘trust, cooperation and growth’ are often encouraging. It is precisely because the international system possesses none of these features that realists’ expectations of achieving such advances abroad are so low.”

P.S. I wrote the above in 2002.

Unfortunately, Haass’ latest makes painfully clear that he has no useful policy advice for President Biden – another multilateralism and international institution fan boy – in a world in which their foreign policy lodestars have become so useless (and in my view have never been essential). I’ve written that recognizing the shortcomings and limitations of international institutions doesn’t require simply abandoning them.

Instead, because cooperation inevitably sometimes be worth seeking, it means recognizing the hard-ball politicking typically needed to prevail; and amassing the power (in all dimensions) needed both to succeed, and to survive and prosper through America’s own devices if others prove recalcitrant. 

In fact, the virtues of this foreign policy strategy seem so obvious that I’ve got the sneaking suspicion that a big reason they became controversial was because they were championed by Trump.  Which raises the intriguing possibility that the Biden administration could wind up adopting an America First-type foreign policy, but in the worst conceivable manner – unwittingly, and even kicking and screaming all the way.      

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Why Scalpels Won’t Cut it Against China

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Biden, China, China Strategy Group, decoupling, Donald Trump, Eric Schmidt, EU, European Union, FDI, foreign direct investment, Germany, Google, health security, Made in America, manufacturing, multilateralism, national security, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, semiconductors, Silicon Valley, supply chain, Taiwan, technology

Yesterday’s RealityChek post argued made clear that one of the two recent blueprints for China policy offered to President Biden from the foreign policy and technology establishments suffered from crippling internal contradictions.

The second effort, from the Silicon Valley-dominated “China Strategy Group,” can be read more profitably by the President, because popping up here and there are some insights that are genuinely valuable especially since they come from analysts once strongly supportive of what they themselves call the pre-Trump strategy of “near-unbounded integration.”

Principally, the group, which notably is co-chaired by Google co-founder Eric Schmidt, calls for recognizing that “some degree of [U.S.-China] disentangling is both inevitable and preferable. In fact, trends in both countries—and many of the tools at our disposal—inherently and necessarily push toward some degree of bifurcation.” In other words, it’s endorsed a limited version of what’s now commonly called economic and technological decoupling.

In addition, it argues that both this decoupling, along with tariffs that it acknowledges may be needed to push back against certain Chinese offenses and provocations, should be pursued even though they will entail costs – a refreshing and crucially important departure from the long-time pre- and post-Trump consensus in the mainstream American political, business and policy communities that any increased consumer or producer price, or loss of even a smidgeon of market share in China resulting from retaliation from Beijing, proves conclusively the folly of placin any significant curbs on doing business with the People’s Republic.

Finally, the group points out that efforts to rebuild domestic supply chains to reduce reliance on China for critical goods must involve “more than a focus on the end products. Safeguarding key technologies requires the United States to define and secure the entire ecosystem of production, from fabrication to supply to talent to cutting-edge innovation.” In other words, Washington can’t simply seek to become self-sufficient, or largely so, in face masks or ventilators or semiconductors. It needs to become self-sufficient or largely so in all the materials, parts, and components required to make these products.

Yet many of these important insights (and useful recommendations for restructuring the U.S. government to foster the competition with China more effectively) are kneecapped by equivocation and a resulting failure to understand that sometimes policy scalpels cut too finely, and some policy needles are too small to be threaded – especially considering the “all of society” drive China’s totalitarian system is making to gain global technology leadership, and the dangers to America’s “security, prosperity, and way of life” Chinese success would create.

For example, the group emphasizes that decoupling policy mustn’t invite “escalatory cycles of confrontation, retaliation, or unintended conflict” or overlook those areas “where cooperation, collaboration, and exchange with China is in our interest, as severing ties and closing off the United States to the ideas, people, technologies, and supply chains necessary to compete effectively will undermine U.S. innovation.” At the same time, the authors acknowledge that China will respond to any further U.S. decoupling moves “more aggressively” precisely because “China’s leaders understand U.S. dependency as an important source of leverage.”

So although in principle, this omelet can be made without breaking many eggs, Beijing won’t be cooperating in fact. And the circle can’t be squared with clever phrase-making like “navigating the asymmetric competition” that look satisfactorily reassuring on paper and in speeches to conferences but that need to survive the body blows that will inevitably be delivered by reality.

The group’s approach to Chinese investment in the United States (whether in the form of creating new businesses or taking over or contributing capital to existing firms) illustrates the other big drawback of granular approaches when it comes to China: They ignore how any Chinese entity big enough to play in any foreign market, and especially America’s, is under Beijing’s thumb in every important respect.

As a result, there’s no point in taking the time and expending the resources to follow the group’s recommendations to figure out which Chinese tech platforms (whose importance it emphasizes) are and are not violating American privacy standards or conducting misinformation campaigns dangerous to democracy, or censoring content Chinese authorities don’t like, or helping suppress human rights in China or anywherer else, or stealing valuable data, or helping terrorists and criminals launder money; or whether these activities matter enough to merit official U.S. attention, or whether troublesome practices can be negotiated away through talks with Beijing on technical and other fixes.

In this instance, Washington should stay out of the black holes of setting priorities and especially monitoring and enforcing agreements, and assume that by simply banning these platforms from operating in the United States and in fact prohibiting all Chinese entities from owning U.S. hard assets. The latter step would add the benefit of shielding participants in America’s economy from competition with subsidized, market-distorting outfits from China. At the very least, Chinese entities should be required to prove that they’re not controlled or subsidized in any way by Beijing, or engaged in the above malign activities, before gaining entry.

In addition, despite the group’s understanding that entire manufacturing eco-systems, not just final products, need to be rebuilt and nurtured to ensure supply chain security, it appears to underestimate just how widely these relationships extend. After all, most of the numerous inputs to goods like mechanical ventilators (like its controls, power sources, monitors, and alarm systems) depend on big and complex supply chain and manufacturing eco-systems themselves.

Further, just as before the pandemic, few expected face masks and surgical gloves to become products vitally important to the nation’s well-being, the list of critical goods is likely to change and grow over time as new threats emerge. Therefore, the group is correct in warning that “any product or service could be termed essential to national security in an extreme hypothetical.” But what’s the basis for confidence that many products or services can safely be ruled out, and that such hypotheticals will always remain extreme?

At least as important, like the Biden administration, the group’s determination not to ruffle too many international feathers has also clearly led it to back the notion that the definition of “Made in America” for supply chain purposes should actually mean, “Also Made in Lots of Other Countries” that it considers trusted suppliers. Unfortunately, many of the countries so classified imposed export controls on critical medical goods during the pandemic’s first wave last spring. That is, when cooperation was most needed, they built walls – meaning that their trustworthiness isn’t exactly ironclad.

And as then President-elect Biden learned when the European Union rebuffed his entreaty to consult with Washington before signing an investment agreement with China, the allies remain determined to fence sit in the U.S.-China technology competition. The group acknowledges that the list of anti-China partners “may include all of the [European Union], though in some cases EU position/member states’ positions are too ambiguous today with respect to China for inclusion in all instances, and members may need to be considered on an individual basis.” But simply stating this position and its EU-splitting ambitions is enough to make clear its absurdity – especially since the EU country most reluctant to cooperate against China is economic kingpin Germany.

None of this is to say that all trade with (as opposed to investment in hard assets from) China should be cut off completely, or that international cooperation can be of no use to the United States in its struggle versus the People’s Republic. In particular, (and due largely to recklessly indiscriminate free trade policies), America urgently needs products and knowhow now dominated by foreign producers (notably Taiwan’s semiconductor manufacturing industry, and Japanese and Dutch suppliers of key microchip production equipment and materials). And if other countries are willing to cooperate with Washington on various China containing initiatives at acceptable prices, more help is indeed better than less. But the United States will never safeguard its interests adequately without realizing that multilateralism can’t be an end in and of itself, and that against monumental threats, axes are usually more effective than scalpels.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: “Anonymous” Inanity on China

Tags

Atlantic Council, Biden, China, China Strateg Group, decoupling, Donald Trump, Foreign Affairs, George F. Kennan, globalism, Iran, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, The Long Telegram, The Longer Telegram, X Article, Xi JInPing

How lucky for President Biden that, just as he’s announced a wide-ranging review of U.S. China policy (after he and his supposedly fellow foreign policy mavens spent the entire presidential campaign lambasting Donald Trump’s initiatives and clearly conveying that they knew exactly how to fix these alleged blunders), a wavelet of advice has appeared offering answers, at least at the broad brush level.

How unfortunate for the United States, though, that so little of this advice has any prospect of advancing and defending American interests vis-a-vis China, much less improving on the Trump efforts to neutralize the China threat. In fact, if Mr. Biden follows his longstanding Beijing-coddling instincts and generally heeds the authors, the United States is bound to become more vulnerable and more beholden to the People’s Republic than ever.

Two blueprints for the President to follow have emerged in recent weeks: a memo from an anonymous author who clearly views him or herself as a latter day George F. Kennan; and a collective effort from a “China Strategy Group” dominated by Silicon Valley figures (and co-chaired by Google co-founder Eric Schmidt). The first is the most easily disposed of, and will be the subject of today’s post. Tomorrow I’ll discuss the Group’s China grope.

Kennan, in case you’ve forgotten, was the mid-twentieth century American diplomat whose analyses of Soviet power and behavior (including an early 1946 memo written during his stint in Moscow that became known as “The Long Telegram”) powerfully shaped the Cold War strategy of containment adopted by Washington. He was by no means perfect, but in my view amply deserves his reputation as one of the most incisive foreign policy analysts in American history – which is why if he read the new and arrogantly titled “The Longer Telegram,” he’d probably be hard-pressed to decide whether to laugh or cry.

The most eye-catching proposal made by the author (whose desire for anonymity apes that displayed Kennan in a 1947 article that grew out of “The Long Telegram” that he published in the journal Foreign Affairs as “X”): urging that rather than focus on broadly changing China’s totalitarian system of government and control over the economy, or targeting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in particular as Public Enemy Number One, U.S. policy recognize Chinese leader Xi Jinping and his inner circle as the dominant game changer that has turned the People’s Republic and its practices from a “manageable” challenge into today’s mortal danger not only to the United States but to the entire world.

I actually agree with the author that prompting Chinese reform of any kind is a fool’s quest – a prime reason that I regard substantially decoupling America’s economy from China’s as the best way to ensure that the nation can handle whatever problems Beijing creates. It was also heartening to see “Anonymous” recognize that dealing with China successfully will be that much harder for Washington if it keeps going out of its way to demonize Russia – which has clearly become a Democratic Party staple.

But concentrating U.S. China policy “through the principal lens of Xi himself” and seeking to capitalize on “significant” opposition within the CCP to “Xi’s leadership and its vast ambitions” in order to “return [China] to its pre-2013 path—i.e., the pre-Xi strategic status quo” suffers from at least two glaringly obvious flaws.

The first is Anonymous’ belief that however numerous China’s challenges to U.S. interests before Xi gained control, “they were manageable and did not represent a serious violation of the US-led international order.” In fact, even the author him/herself doesn’t seem to believe this.

If he or she did, why admit that the current Chinese challenge, “to some extent, has been gradually emerging over the last two decades”? And that that “China has long had an integrated internal strategy for handling the United States….” And that pursuing its goals “nationally, bilaterally, regionally, multilaterally, and globally….has been China’s approach for decades.” And that “What links” today’s China threat and that posed by the Soviet Union in particular during the early Cold War is that “the CCP, like the former CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union], is an avowedly Leninist party with a profoundly Marxist worldview”?

Have Xi’s ambitions magnified the threat? Of course. But – as Anonymous also admits – not because Chinese leaders’ goals have fundamentally changed, but because growing economic and therefore military strength have brought them within reach.

In the author’s own words,

“China has undergone a dramatic economic rise in recent decades, and it is using its economic power to engage in coercive practices and to become the center of global innovation….China is transforming its economic heft into military strength, modernizing its military and developing capabilities to counter the United States’ ability to project power in the western Pacific.”

And although China has generated much of this impressive progress through its own devices, it’s also indisputable that its closely related economic, technological, and military advances stem from the U.S. and other free world resources and knowhow that flooded into China precisely when the bipartisan Washington consensus viewed any possible dangers emanating from Beijing as “manageable.” In other words, whether knowingly or not, Anonymous in effect is arguing for a return to the policies that helped create the problem he’s (correctly) identified. And P.S. Since he or she is described as “a former senior government official with deep expertise and experience dealing with China,” chances are the author had more than a minor hand in crafting this failed approach.

The second fatal flaw in “The Longer Telegram” is its assumption that American foreign policymakers understand enough “about the fault lines of internal Chinese politics” to manipulate them into bringing back those allegedly manageable pre-Xi leaders. To which anyone with even the skimpiest knowledge of American diplomacy should be responding, “Remember Iran.”

For since that country’s 1979 revolution replaced a generally pro-American monarch with a zealously anti-American Shiite Islamic theocracy, U.S. leaders have tried repeatedly to find influential moderates that would help reshape the new regime’s behavior. Because the United States knew so little about the internal politics and fault lines of this leadership, all these efforts have failed. Does Anonymous really believe that Washington’s knowledge of China’s even more secretive leadership is any better?

The Atlantic Council, the globalist Washington, D.C. think tank that published “The Longer Telegram,” calls it “one of the most insightful and rigorous examinations to date of Chinese geopolitical strategy and how an informed American strategy would address the challenges of China’s own strategic ambitions.”

Actually, its signature recommendation is so internally contradictory and naive that I don’t blame the author for wanting to stay Anonymous.