Our So-Called Foreign Policy: More Childish Attacks on Trump

Tags

alliances, allies, Council on Foreign Relations, foreign policy establishment, George H.W. Bush, Greece, IMF, International Monetary Fund, international organizations, internationalism, Iran deal, JCPOA, Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, journalists, Mainstream Media, media, military bases, NAFTA, New Zealand, North American Free Trade Agreement, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Paris climate accord, Philippines, Richard N. Haass, Ronald Reagan, TPP, Trans-Pacific Partnership, Trump, UN, UNESCO, United Nations, Withdrawal Doctrine, World Bank, World Trade Organization, WTO

I’m getting to think that in an important way it’s good that establishment journalists and foreign policy think tank hacks still dominate America’s debate on world affairs. It means that for the foreseeable future, we’ll never run out of evidence of how hidebound, juvenile, and astonishingly ignorant these worshipers of the status quo tend to be. Just consider the latest fad in their ranks: the narrative that the only theme conferring any coherence on President Trump’s foreign policy is his impulse to pull the United States out of alliances and international organizations, or at least rewrite them substantially.

This meme was apparently brewed up at the heart of the country’s foreign policy establishment – the Council on Foreign Relations. Its president, former aide to Republican presidents Richard N. Haass, tweeted on October 12, “Trump foreign policy has found its theme: The Withdrawal Doctrine. US has left/threatening to leave TPP, Paris accord, Unesco, NAFTA, JCPOA.” [He’s referring here to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal that aimed to link the U.S. economy more tightly to East Asian and Western Hemisphere countries bordering the world’s largest ocean; the global deal to slow down climate change; the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization; the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – the official name of the agreement seeking to deny Iran nuclear weapons.]

In a classic instance of group-think, this one little 140-character sentence was all it took to spur the claim’s propagation by The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Marketwatch.com, Vice.com, The Los Angeles Times, and Britain’s Financial Times (which publishes a widely read U.S. edition).  For good measure, the idea showed up in The New Republic, too – albeit without mentioning Haass.

You’d have to read far into (only some of) these reports to see any mention that American presidents taking similar decisions is anything but unprecedented. Indeed, none of them reminded readers of one of the most striking examples of alliance disruption from the White House: former President Ronald Reagan’s decision to withdraw American defense guarantees to New Zealand because of a nuclear weapons policy dispute. Moreover, the administrations of Reagan and George H.W. Bush engaged in long, testy negotiations with long-time allies the Philippines and Greece on renewing basing agreements that involved major U.S. cash payments.

Just as important, you could spend hours on Google without finding any sense in these reports that President Trump has decided to remain in America’s major security alliances in Europe and Asia, as well as in the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (along with a series of multilateral regional development banks).

More important, you’d also fail to find on Google to find any indication that any of the arrangements opposed by Mr. Trump might have less than a roaring success. The apparent feeling in establishment ranks is that it’s not legitimate for American leaders to decide that some international arrangements serve U.S. interests well, some need to be recast, and some are such failures or are so unpromising that they need to be ditched or avoided in the first place.

And the reason that such discrimination is so doggedly opposed is that, the internationalist world affairs strategy pursued for decades by Presidents and Congresses across the political spectrum (until, possibly, now) is far from a pragmatic formula for dealing with a highly variegated, dynamic world. Instead, it’s the kind of rigid dogma that’s most often (and correctly) associated with know-it-all adolescents and equally callow academics. What else but an utterly utopian ideology could move a writer from a venerable pillar of opinion journalism (the aforementioned Atlantic) to traffick in such otherworldly drivel as

“A foreign-policy doctrine of withdrawal also casts profound doubt on America’s commitment to the intricate international system that the United States helped create and nurture after World War II so that countries could collaborate on issues that transcend any one nation.”

Without putting too fine a point on it, does that sound like the planet you live on?

I have no idea whether whatever changes President Trump is mulling in foreign policy will prove effective or disastrous, or turn out to be much ado about very little. I do feel confident in believing that the mere fact of rethinking some foreign policy fundamentals makes his approach infinitely more promising than one that views international alliances and other arrangements in all-or-nothing terms; that evidently can’t distinguish the means chosen to advance U.S. objectives from the objectives themselves; and that seems oblivious to the reality that the international sphere lacks the characteristic that makes prioritizing institution’s creation and maintenance not only possible in the domestic sphere, but indispensable – a strong consensus on defining acceptable and unacceptable behavior.

One of the most widely (and deservedly) quoted adages about international relations is the observation, attributed to a 19^th century British foreign minister, that his nation had “no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.” Until America’s foreign policy establishment and its media mouthpieces recognize that this advice applies to international institutions, too, and start understanding the implications, they’ll keep losing influence among their compatriots. And rightly so.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: An Oncoming Asia Policy Crackup?

Tags

ASEAN, Asia-Pacific, China, Japan, maritime tensions, nuclear missiles, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Philippines, pivot

Things have gotten awfully interesting in the East Asia-Pacific region this month – and not in a good way. Although these developments are less dramatic than the violence rocking Iraq, Ukraine, and Gaza (no, I won’t add “Ferguson”!), they could threaten American security and prosperity at least as much if they stay on their current troubling track.

On my list:

>China keeps challenging the region’s maritime status quo, eliciting a warning from the Philippines over the weekend that its growing tendency to send “research vessels” into waters internationally recognized (except by Beijing) as part of Manila’s “exclusive economic zone” was needlessly raising tensions.

>As shown in their latest gabfest, however, the Philippines’ fellow members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are reluctant to protest China’s moves openly for fear of fueling Chinese expansionism further – not to mention jeopardizing trade and investment ties.

>China’s state-run media revealed that Beijing has developed a new intercontinental ballistic missile that the Pentagon believes could be able to deliver multiple warheads on targets anywhere in the continental United States. China has long possessed “MIRVed” nuclear missiles capable of striking the American homeland, but the new weapon’s range reportedly has extended Chinese capabilities by 2,000 kilometers.

>Highly respected Australian analysts are now wondering whether the United States and other countries are fundamentally misinterpreting China’s motives in its Asian saber-rattling. Hugh White and Amy King of the Australian National University have just written that, contrary to the conventional wisdom that Beijing is counterproductively risking a revival of Japanese militarism with its recent belligerence, China may have confidently concluded that (in White’s words) “After twenty years of economic stagnation, political drift, demographic decline and natural disasters, Japan is simply too demoralised to remake itself into a serious independent military power again.”

Another Australian strategist, John Craig of the Centre for Policy and Development Systems, has speculated that, despite the high levels of Sino-Japanese tensions that have dominated headlines over the last year, Beijing is actually subtly paving the way for creating an anti-American alliance with nationalists in Tokyo that would oppose the free-market economic and democratic political orders that Washington has sought to establish in the region. The prospect of anti-American collaboration by East Asian giants whose economic and political traditions differ dramatically from America’s has also long been raised by veteran Asia specialist Eamonn Fingleton.

It’s virtually impossible for any outsider to know exactly what’s being planned or explored in Chinese and Japanese leadership circles – or even close. But the recent events that have been reliably reported cast major doubts on America’s long-time grand strategy in East Asia.

Since the end of World War II, Washington has maintained major military forces in the region and looked the other way as its major economies built or rebuilt by racking up huge trade surpluses with the United States that devastated many of America’s productive sectors. Before the fall of communism, the rationale for both policies was keeping China and/or the Soviet Union from controlling Asia’s resources, markets, and especially its military-industrial potential. After the Cold War, the U.S. presence was described as vital for preserving peace and stability in a booming region full of matchless business opportunities for American companies and workers alike.

The purely economic case for the U.S. approach vanished decades ago. Sure, the Asia-Pacific region keeps growing robustly. But because its countries as a group are by far America’s most difficult trade competitor, much of this growth continues to be generated at America’s expense. Since the current recovery began in mid-2009, U.S. merchandise trade deficits with these economies have grown by nearly 58 percent – compared with a 41 percent rise in the U.S. global goods trade deficit. That is, U.S.-Asia commerce is actually killing American growth and jobs on net — and at a rate much faster than that U.S. global trade and investment as a whole.

Now the developments above represent warnings are making the strategic underpinnings of America’s strategy – unchallenged military superiority (including nuclear escalation dominance) and reliable allies – look shakier than ever.

President Obama’s response so far? A strategic “pivot” back to the Asia Pacific motivated by an apparently faith-based insistence that economic engagement with the region is a winner for Americans, and by an at least equally dubious assumption that America’s Middle East wars were winding down for good. In other words, if you’re wondering how American leaders can possibly mess up worse on the world stage, before long you may simply have to look across the Pacific.