Our So-Called Foreign Policy: An Asia Grand Strategy that Still Looks Like America Last

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Asia, Barack Obama, China, Defense Department, export controls, John McCain, military spending, neoconservatives, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, pivot, technology transfer, The Wall Street Journal, Trump

It looks like the Trump administration is going All Neocon on its Asia grand strategy. Or is it All Obama? Interestingly, both approaches have shared the same main features, and depressingly, both are dangerously incoherent and disturbingly resemble the course that Mr. Trump apparently has chosen to follow. .

The essence of neoconservative strategy in Asia consists of bloviating about the risks to America’s national security from China in particular, pushing for a stronger American military response, and with equal vigor backing economic policies that inevitably boost China’s military strength. And the quintessential example is Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona.

McCain has voted for his entire career in favor of the U.S. trade policy decisions that have enabled China to amass literally trillions of dollars worth of trade surpluses with the United States, and therefore finance an enormous military buildup that he himself has warned directly threatens American interests in Asia. He’s periodically voiced concerns about the lax U.S. export controls that have enabled China to secure some of America’s best defense-related technology. But he’s never sponsored any steps capable of solving this problem.

What McCain has focused on has been boosting military spending and stationing more of these forces, in large part to counter burgeoning Chinese ambitions. And recent Trump administration moves make clear that the president and his top advisers have been listening. As The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month:

“The Pentagon has endorsed a plan to invest nearly $8 billion to bulk up the U.S. presence in the Asia-Pacific region over the next five years by upgrading military infrastructure, conducting additional exercises and deploying more forces and ships….The proposal, dubbed the Asia-Pacific Stability Initiative, was first floated by Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) and has been embraced by other lawmakers and, in principle, by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and the head of U.S. Pacific Command, Adm. Harry Harris. Proponents haven’t developed details of the $7.5 billion plan.”

The Journal account goes on to remind readers that the Obama administration had pursued its own military “pivot” to Asia, but that it was “disparaged by critics as thin on resources and military muscle.” And of course, the former president refused to respond effectively to China’s predatory trade practices, and only very late in his second term began rethinking flood of advanced defense-related knowhow to the PRC.

President Trump has of course spoken repeatedly of acting forcefully to overhaul America’s China trade policies. But his administration’s actions so far have fallen far short of this mark.

The mind-blowing upshot: In a military conflict with China, the United States forces could find themselves fighting against, and taking casualties from, Chinese units and weapons that have been paid for and researched by their enemy. Is that the kind of first so many Americans voted for?

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Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Desperately Seeking Real Retrenchment

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Afghanistan, American exceptionalism, Asia-Pacific, Baltic states, Bashir Al-Assad, boots on the ground, Charles Lanes, chemical weapons, defense budget, defense spending, Earl Ravenal, George W. Bush, international law, Iraq, ISIS, isolationism, Middle East, multilateralism, national interests, NATO, Nixon Doctrine, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, pivot, Poland, Richard Nixon, Russia, sequestration, Soviet Union, Stephen Sestanovich, Syria, Ukraine, Vietnam War, vital interests, Vladimir Putin, Washington Post

Washington Post columnist Charles Lane has just done an excellent job of demonstrating how powerfully universalist America’s bipartisan foreign policy establishment remains – even as powerful reasons keep multiplying for climbing down from this wildly ambitious approach.

According to Lane, a new book by former American diplomat and Columbia University political scientist Stephen Sestanovich bears out President Obama’s claim to be a kindred spirit with Richard M. Nixon as a “retrenchment” president – one of the chief executives who has sought to “correct the perceived overreaching of their predecessors and free up U.S. resources for domestic concerns.” In fact, says Lane, Sestanovich has written that post-World War II U.S. foreign policy has been marked by a “constant pendulum-swing between administrations that aggressively pursued U.S. goals abroad” (who the author calls “maximalists”) and those Nixon- and Obama-style retrenchers.

I hate to comment on books I haven’t yet read. But Lane’s description of Mr. Nixon and Mr. Obama both qualify as retrenchers reveals a mindset so enthusiastic about massive and potentially open-ended U.S. involvement in literally every corner of the world if necessary that it sees even talk about a more discriminating approach as a major departure.

Judging by the record, it hasn’t been. In fact, both the Nixon talk and the Obama talk about retrenchment have been overwhelmingly that – talk. Just as important, and closely related, what have arguably looked at least superficially like exercises in retrenchment have in fact been exercises in wishful thinking. Both presidents have actually agreed that the security, stability, and even prosperity of the entire world are U.S. vital interests. They’ve simply differed with the maximalists in insisting that these interests can be defended through means that are less dangerous and violent, and more globally popular, than the unilateral U.S. use of military force.

To cite the leading historical example, the ballyhooed Nixon Doctrine of 1970 was never a decision to cross Vietnam or any part of Asia off the list of vital U.S. interests – those whose defense was thought essential for maintaining America’s own security and prosperity. As explained initially by Earl C. Ravenal shortly after the Doctrine’s declaration, Mr. Nixon had decided, in the absence of any evidence, that this vital set of objectives could be defended without an early resort to U.S. military involvement – chiefly, by the militaries of America’s regional allies.

Therefore, Ravenal wrote:

“the Administration’s new policies and decision processes do not bring about the proposed balance [between the country’s foreign policy ends and the means to be used to attain them]; in fact, they create a more serious imbalance. Essentially we are to support the same level of potential involvement with smaller conventional forces. The specter of intervention will remain, but the risk of defeat or stalemate will be greater; or the nuclear threshold will be lower.”

President Obama has given us a different version of such dangerous wishful thinking. More accurately, he’s given us several different versions. His original 2008 candidacy for the White House was largely motivated by a conviction that the overly unilateralist and militaristic tendencies of George W. Bush had produced disaster in Iraq, and were actually undermining U.S. security by damaging America’s international image.

That’s why Mr. Obama focused so much attention on repairing that image. He never indicated that he would scale back that list of U.S. vital interests. He simply suggested that they could be better defended if need be by acting multilaterally, with international approval, rather than by going it alone. And he conveyed the clear impression that challenges could be prevented in the first place if only America became more popular in regions like the Middle East.

Once in office, Mr. Obama did try to establish a hierarchy of U.S. worldwide interests that would have operational impact. He decided that the nation had been so preoccupied with Middle East wars that it had been neglected the Asia-Pacific region, which he considered at least as important. So he launched a “pivot” that would transfer some American forces from the former to the latter.

But the president never apparently judged the Middle East to be less important to America’s fate. He simply concluded that, with the Afghanistan and Iraq wars supposedly winding down, it had become less dangerous. Having been proven wrong by the rise of ISIS. in Afghanistan, he’s (gradually) boosting the American military presence in region again. The president is claiming, moreover – based on as little evidence as Mr. Nixon required – that any remaining capabilities gap can be filled by the armed forces of regional countries. Worse, many of his Republican critics, who are just as reluctant to deploy many more U.S. “boots on the ground,” agree with Mr. Obama’s fundamental assessment.

Further, the president has actually expanded the list of circumstances in the Middle East (and presumably elsewhere) that should justify American military responses – the kinds of chemical weapons attacks launched by Bashir Al-Assad against Syrians revolting against his dictatorship, along with similar major violations of international law.  (This effort, so far, has not yet won over the public.)

Nor does that exhaust Mr. Obama’s efforts to lengthen the list of U.S. vital interests. He has understandably responded to Russia’s recent provocations against allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) by strengthening U.S. forces and deploying them more conspicuously in new NATO members like Poland and the Baltic states, former Soviet satellites clearly in Moscow’s line of fire. Less understandable have been the Obama administration’s numerous suggestions that the security of Ukraine, too, is a matter of urgent American concern – even though this country was actually part of the old Soviet Union for decades with no apparent effects on U.S. safety or well-being.

Yet like the debate over countering ISIS, that over dealing with Vladimir Putin spotlights one major difference between President Obama and his (mainly) Republican foreign policy critics: Many of them have strongly backed big boosts in the U.S. military budget (if not always using these forces), including aggressive moves to circumvent spending caps established by the sequestration process. Mr. Obama has not sought comparable increases.

The president unquestionably has often spoken in terms that seem to support a smaller U.S. role in the world – e.g., his remarks suggesting that America’s exceptionalism isn’t all that exceptional, and reminding that much of the world has legitimate historical grievances against the West, and in some cases against the United States specifically. But his strategic walk has never matched this talk, and the continuing flood of contentions to the contrary in the punditocracy and even academe (if Lane’s Post column is accurate) plainly are serving their (partly) intended purpose of preventing searching debate on foreign policy fundamentals.

Given the nation’s resulting over-extension militarily, therefore, when the chattering class powers-that-be start labeling presidents or most other politicians as retrenchers or minimalists (an improvement to be sure over the hackneyed charge of “isolatonism”), the only legitimate reaction is a thoroughly exasperated, “If only.”

Following Up: The China Aid Bank Debate Gets Dumb and Dumberer

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AIIB, allies, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, Australia, China, containment, Financial Crisis, Following Up, Global Imbalances, IMF, Japan, pivot, quotas, TPP, Trade, Trans-Pacific Partnership, World Trade Organization

It’s been a while since any global development has generated so much hypocrisy, baloney, and hypocritical baloney as China’s new Asia infrastructure bank and America’s response. (OK – maybe it’s only been a couple of days.) Still, the hubbub about something whose name is dominated by a MEGO word if ever there was one (“infrastructure”) is worth examining again. For it once again reminds that U.S. leaders, as well as most of our leading commentators, really aren’t smarter than a fifth grader when it comes to foreign policy, international relations, and the Pacific Rim.

Last week, I focused on how the rush of American allies to join the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) exposed the folly of President Obama’s dream of a Pacific Rim trade zone that would be governed by U.S.-style commercial rules. Since then, however, it’s become embarrassingly clear that the same ridicule is deserved by the president’s belief that his Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal will balance rising Chinese power in the region. For Japan is now apparently ready to join the long list of TPP countries (including Australia, one of the planned pact’s other major economies) that is signing up with the Chinese. Whether Mr. Obama really does believe in “leading from behind” or not, it’s getting painfully obvious that he has precious few followers.

In addition, some recent commentary shows that it’s imperative to dispel two other myths surrounding the AIIB and hanging over the future of the Asia Pacific region and the rest of the globe.

The first has to do with the nature of President Obama’s China strategy. Critics of his administration’s opposition to the AIIB’s creation charge him with pursuing a crude, outdated strategy of containing China’s rise the way many of his predecessors sought to contain the former Soviet Union. Nothing could be further from the truth. There’s no question that the president wants the United States to remain the Asia-Pacific region’s preeminent power, that he sees China as America’s main challenger, and that he’s even announced that America’s grand global strategy will “pivot” from its preoccupation with the Middle East to give economically dynamic Asia its proper due. There’s also no question that, even before the last year’s flareup of large-scale Middle East violence, it was apparent that the Obama pivot was nearly all talk and little military redeployment.

But Mr. Obama’s China/Asia strategy is not simply half-hearted. It is completely incoherent. For despite his stated China concerns, the president has steadfastly continued his predecessors’ policies of looking the other way while Beijing’s predatory trade policies led to huge trade surpluses with the United States (which have undoubtedly helped China finance its huge, ongoing military buildup), and while U.S. technology and manufacturing companies transferred much of their most advanced knowhow to China (which has undoubtedly increased the sophistication of China’s weapons and helped teach the Chinese how to hack effectively).

In other words, Mr. Obama has kept feeding the beast he has warned against. As a result, the only legitimate beef American allies have with the administration’s current opposition to the AIIB is that it has been so sudden, and so completely out of character.

The second myth entails the claim that the United States (and especially the hawks in its Congress) are reaping what they have sown when they decided to block a decision by other International Monetary Fund members to give China more voting power in the institution. What the critics forget is that the world already has experience bringing China into a front-line international organization before making sure that Bejiing would act as “a responsible stakeholder” of the international system (as a former senior Bush administration policymaker once put it). And it’s backfired disastrously.

Since joining the World Trade Organization, China has profited handsomely from the benefits of membership (which include substantial immunity from unilateral American counters to Chinese protectionism). But it shouldered few of the obligations. The immense, China-centric global trade and investment imbalances that built up subsequently were crucial in setting the stage for the financial crisis. Those who hope that dealing with Western powers in the AIIB will lead to more constructive Chinese behavior need to explain why China will not remain as parasitic as ever, and even backslide – as it has on trade and economic liberalization during its WTO years.

More broadly, the free-riding U.S. allies who are grabbing for Chinese money while still enjoying American military protection are forgetting a vitally important (for them) truth. The United States is geopolitically and economically self-sufficient enough now – and potentially much more so – to be able to get by quite nicely a world with a much more influential China. Few of them, particularly in China’s neighborhood, can say the same.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: The Washington Post’s Embarrasingly Bad Pro-TPP Editorials Just Keep Coming

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Asia, China, escalation dominance, exports, Japan, Jobs, North Korea, pivot, rules-based trade, TPP, Trade, Trans-Pacific Partnership, Uruguay Round, Washington Post, World Trade Organization, WTO, {What's Left of) Our Economy

It’s a good thing for the offshoring lobby and other mindless American trade cheerleaders that the fate of President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and other new trade deals won’t depend significantly on Washington Post editorials. If it did, the proposed Pacific rim agreement and the new negotiating authority also being sought by the president would be DOA in Congress.

The Post‘s latest missive on behalf of the TPP stumbled practically out of the gate. According to Post editorialists, the president’s claims that the Pacific deal and a roughly similar pact with Europe would boost American exports and create high wage domestic jobs were a welcome breath of fresh air. Huh?

The editorial then proceeded to careen ever faster downhill. According to the Post, listeners shouldn’t take literally Mr. Obama’s contention that “as we speak, China wants to write the rules for world’s fastest growing region. That would put our workers and our businesses at a disadvantage.” According to the Post, taking the president’s words at face value would amount to believing a “conspiratorial” charge that “Beijing’s bureaucrats are plotting to impose a whole new set of laws and regulations on East Asia’s economy.”

What Post writers evidently have forgotten is that turning the world trading system into one that’s governed by the rule of law instead of the law of the jungle has long been a central aim of U.S. policy. We know this, and we know that the TPP is Washington’s latest effort to achieve this goal, in large part because not only do Presidents keep highlighting its importance. So do major newspaper editorials – like this very same Post offering, which insists that the deal would “organize trade in the Pacific Rim according to U.S. free-trade principles rather than China’s mercantilist goals.”

Nor is this a standalone Post position. Last April, its editorial board wrote that TPP would:

“ensure that this huge area, including giants such as Japan, Canada, Mexico and Australia, conducts business according to U.S.-style rules on tariffs, regulation and intellectual property. China would be left on the sidelines, along with its mercantilist model of international commerce — unless and until it modifies that approach.”

What the Post – and the president – need to understand is that this quest for rules-based trade, as I’ve argued before, is actually counter-productive for Americans because so many of its trade competitors, especially in Asia, reject the idea of rules-based governance in their own countries. Believing that their governments will apply it to Americans (and other foreigners) when they deny this benefit to their own people is simply daffy.

At the same time, because American political culture is based on the rule of law, while U.S. competitors merrily keep ignoring new trade rules, the United States will keep respecting them – which has been a sure-fire recipe for super-charged trade deficits, slower growth, mounting job loss, lower wages, and astronomical national debt. Doubters should consider that these have been the unmistakable results of Washington pushing and signing the Uruguay Round agreement, which created a new organization – the World Trade Organization – aimed at writing and enforcing strong global trade rules, as well as bilateral deals like the free trade agreement with Korea, which is Mr. Obama’s so-called “high standards” model for the TPP.

But the Post‘s exercise in incoherence doesn’t stop there. Readers are told that the president’s reference to trade rules is really an allusion to:

“the wider strategic rationale for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would link North and South America, Australia and New Zealand more closely, and on more equitable terms, with Japan and other key Asian nations. By and large, these Asian countries seek to maintain a strong U.S. presence in their region as a counterweight to Chinese influence.”

TPP success “is therefore a vital interest for them — and for the United States. Both economically and geopolitically, the ­Trans-Pacific Partnership would perpetuate the United States’ stabilizing role in Asia….”

What these passages reveal is that the Post‘s editorialists don’t know the first thing about power politics, leverage, and bargaining chips – or even about the strategic situation in the East Asia/Pacific region. The United States has maintained a “strong presence” there since 1945 in the form of the Seventh Fleet and other military forces. It’s not going anywhere, and in fact, the administration’s military “pivot” away from the Middle East and toward Asia signals the aim to reinforce these units (even though little progress has been made so far on this front – at best).  

Not that big threats to America’s grand strategy in the Pacific region aren’t easy to identify apart from actual U.S. force levels.  As I’ve argued, the nation’s seemingly impending loss of nuclear escalation dominance against both North Korea and China is a far bigger worry.  TPP is completely irrelevant to solving this problem. 

And however important this region’s security and independence is to America strategically and economically, it’s obviously more important to local countries. Which means that they have a much greater need to demonstrate their usefulness to the United States than vice versa. That so many of these countries, especially Japan, have balked for so long at American proposals to open their markets wider says loud and clear that the Obama negotiating team has ignored these realities, and that anyone linked to this strategy should be fired for sheer incompetence. Editorial writers who parrot this nonsense of course can do no such damage to U.S. interests. But shouldn’t they be shown the door too?

(Our So-Called Foreign Policy): U.S. Asia Strategy’s Crumbling Nuclear Foundation

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APEC, Asia, China, Japan, North Korea, nuclear deterrence, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, pivot, South Korea, Xi JInPing

Both at this week’s region-wide Asia summit and bilateral meetings in Beijing with China’s leader Xi Jinping and others, President Obama will be lacking the kind of crucial military leverage his successors could count on: escalation dominance. And its accelerating loss is undercutting the wisdom not only of his policy of reemphasizing the Asia-Pacific region in America’s global grand strategy, but of the fundamental approach to Asian allies and rivals pursued by Washington since the end of World War II.

Put simply, escalation dominance is the capacity to deter a prospective adversary from challenging major interests, and has been enjoyed by the United States in East Asia due to its superiority in nuclear weapons. America’s military strategy for protecting Korea, Japan, and others has utilized conventional forces as well. But given the conventional military power of China and North Korea in particular, it’s been nuclear weapons that have mainly and continually forced Beijing and Pyongyang to think long and hard before threatening or moving against their neighbors. After all, defying Washington ultimately could unleash a U.S. nuclear attack to which adversaries had no comparable response.

It’s true that China has possessed nuclear weapons for decades, and North Korea successfully tested its first nuclear device in 2006. But although the U.S. edge has narrowed steadily, in terms of quantity and quality, these Asian nuclear forces have remained positively dwarfed by America’s.

In just the last month, however, the U.S. Defense Department has reported important moves by North Korea and China that spell big trouble for America’s nuclear lead and the policies it undergirds. In late October, the commander of American forces in Korea told reporters that the North can now build a miniaturized nuclear missile warhead. Pyongyang had already claimed (but there’s no confirmation yet) to have missiles with ranges long enough to hit the United States. But creating a nuclear explosive small enough actually to be carried by such a missile remained a formidable technological challenge – apparently until now.

U.S. strategy has relied heavily on the threat of a nuclear response to prevent North Korean aggression both because Pyongyang’s conventional forces have stacked up well against their combined American and South Korean counterparts, and because Washington could be confident that the North could not retaliate in kind on the peninsula, much less against American territory. Any significant North Korean intercontinental nuclear missile force would dramatically upset these calculations, and bolster the North’s confidence that any war it launched against the south would stay conventional – and thus succeed. America could face the terrible dilemma of sacrificing (name any U.S. City) to save Seoul.

Unconfirmed press accounts have just reported an even more stunning possible North Korean nuclear arms advance: a submarine that can fire ballistic missiles. This accomplishment would give Pyongyang a nuclear force that is not only powerful, but able to survive an initial exchange. That is, submarine-launched missiles could escape detection, and thus either preemptive or retaliatory strikes from the United States.

Defense experts seem to agree that this North Korean capability is years from actually appearing. (Mobile land-based North Korean nuclear missiles will probably be developed much sooner.) But the Pentagon believes that China will develop a nuclear missile sub much sooner – possibly by New Year’s. China recently demonstrated that its nuclear-powered attack submarines can now venture far beyond Asian coastal seas and into the Persian Gulf as well as the waters off Hawaii.

But the Pentagon believes that soon Beijing will launch a submarine that can carry nuclear-tipped missiles far enough into the Pacific to hit the continental United States. Even if these vessels stay in East Asia, their weapons could reach Alaska and Hawaii.

When its navy passes this milestone, China could feel much freer to press its recent spate of territorial claims against Asian neighbors without worrying about facing the U.S. Seventh Fleet. For Washington’s commitments to defend even treaty allies like Japan and Korea – much less the small, uninhabited islands and even energy-rich seas currently being contested – would have become much more dangerous. Supporting non-allies like Vietnam and the Philippines would look far more problematic, as would acting to preserve the independence of former Chinese province Taiwan.

These emerging North Korean and Chinese nuclear capabilities would not completely defang the United States in Asia. But as was the case with Cold War Europe after the Soviet Union built the Bomb and then reached nuclear parity – and possibly today in the Age of Putin – they present Washington with a set of wholly new and much more fateful set of choices.

For example, President Obama could decide to strengthen America’s own non-nuclear forces in East Asia, its own nuclear deterrent, or both. He could urge America’s Asian allies and other regional powers to beef up their own militaries instead of, or in conjunction with, a U.S. buildup. Conversely, the president could retrench, and rely on America’s role as the leading market for Asia’s export goods can ensure its essential interests in Asia – which arguably are economic.

Depending on the President’s other foreign and domestic priorities, and America’s national finances, any of these choices, along with other alternatives, is perfectly defensible. What’s now indefensible is assuming that nothing fundamental on the East Asian strategic scene has changed, and that Washington can still stare down foes in a showdown. Nothing would be likelier to boost the odds of a disastrous miscalculation in a region of steadily rising tensions.

Following Up: Intel’s New Moves Boost Odds of China/Asia Blowback

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blowback, China, exports, Following Up, free trade, Intel, Jobs, Middle East, national security, Obama, pivot, recovery, state capitalism, technology

Critics of President Obama’s decision to escalate America’s military involvement in the Middle East often bring up the danger of “blowback”: the repeated instances of advanced U.S. weapons transferred to allied forces winding up with enemy forces, from the Taliban in Afghanistan to ISIS in Iraq. I wish they’d train some of their fire on an even bigger, more worrisome example of at least potential blowback: the continuing transfer of militarily-relevant technology to a Chinese government whose growing aggressiveness in East Asia the president has resolved to counter with his decision to “pivot” more U.S. military forces to the region.

I’ve already detailed numerous cases of American high tech companies sharing with Chinese partners – including the Chinese government – the knowhow to develop hardware and software that can easily be used to develop better capabilities on both physical and cyber battlefields. But this rope-selling (to use Lenin’s vivid metaphor) continues apace – most recently with Intel’s decision to invest in and help Chinese companies produce better semiconductors.

At first glance, Intel’s move seems to pose no threat to U.S. national security, and to be vital for Intel’s own success going forward. The company has been lagging in producing semiconductors for smartphones and equally mobile tablets. China is the world’s largest smartphone market and leading manufacturing site. And Intel’s cooperation with Tsinghua Group will focus on developing chips for the cheapo but technologically advanced phones selling so well in low-income countries like China. The Tsinghua investment, moreover, builds on Intel’s establishment earlier this year of a Smart Device Innovation Center and $100 million venture fund in the same field, and tie-up with a Chinese fabless chip-maker. What not to like?

Certainly, however, Intel’s China strategy, raises important economic issues. Apparently, the company sees no prospect of supplying huge third world markets for mobile devices with equally impressive growth credentials from the United States. That would sure be a nice new source of American export growth – as well as GDP growth and hiring. But because so much of U.S and world production (including assembly) of electronics and infotech products has been offshored to China, China is now the natural choice for producing new components for these devices.

Intel’s new investments are also problematic from a free trade standpoint. After all, its newest China partner is an arm of the Chinese government. And in its own announcement of the Intel deal, that government issued a reminder that “It has become a national priority of China to grow its semiconductor industry” and predicted that the team-up “will accelerate the technology development and further strengthen the competitiveness and market position of Chinese semiconductor companies.”

In other words, from China’s standpoint, it’s not just about semiconductors for consumer products. It’s about China’s officially supported and subsidized drive to become an even bigger player in global technology markets. How does enabling such Chinese government industrial policy increase the global economic efficiency that’s a fundamental stated rationale for freer global trade and investment? And how does strengthening China’s tech sector help the U.S. economy?

But China’s ambitions also threaten the Obama pivot. And because the pivot increases U.S. exposure to conflict in East Asia, they threaten American security as well. Technological capability is a foundation of national military strength, and even if the new Intel China operations simply improved Chinese prowess in telecommunications, sending and processing massive amounts of information accurately and quickly is a major component of the military edge America holds over China and other rivals. By further strengthening China’s technology base, Intel (and all the other American companies that have bolstered China’s capabilities) is helping to reduce that margin of U.S. superiority.

As a result, the President’s pivot and his apparent “What, me worry?” approach to U.S. corporate moves that strengthen the Chinese military keep raising the odds of the United States fighting an enemy it keeps helping to arm. It’s hard to imagine a worse and more unnecessary lose-lose proposition for America’s military and the nation’s overall security.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: An China/East Asia Strategy that Feeds the Beast

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Asia, China, defense spending, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, pivot, technology transfer

I’ve been writing a lot lately about how the mistake America’s bipartisan foreign policy establishment keeps making by relying almost exclusively on traditional foreign policy instruments to safeguard U.S. national security.

Not that military force and diplomacy have lost their effectiveness. Indeed, dealing successfully with the ISIS terrorism threat in the Middle East will be impossible without using the former. But that’s only because for decades presidents have avoided taking the domestic steps – chiefly on the energy and border security fronts – that would have capitalized on America’s considerable ability to marginalize this hopelessly diseased region from its national fortunes, and that have the immense advantage of being much easier to control than events abroad.

Looking for another example of excessive and unaffordably wasteful reliance on standard foreign policy tools and total neglect of more efficient means of achieving stated goals? None stands out like America’s approach to East Asia.

Since the end of World War II, the United States has leaned heavily on large troop deployments in the region and alliances with its major noncommunist countries to keep the ambitions of the Soviet Union and China at bay. Although Moscow has been largely out of the picture since communism fell a quarter century ago, the Chinese threat now appears to be returning – so much so that it’s regularly cited in American defense policy speeches and strategy documents.

I’ve long believed that the United States is so well-armed and so geographically remote from East Asia, and that its economic relations with the fast-growing but highly protectionist region have been such a loser on net, that Washington should withdraw from East Asia militarily. Essential U.S. interests can be much more safely and effectively advanced overwhelmingly by using the decisive bargaining power America enjoys from its status as by far the most important market for export-dependent Asian economies.

But even supporters of the current Asia strategy urgently need to start recognizing that their neglect of less traditional foreign policy approaches is creating needless dangers for the country, not to mention major costs and other economic strains.

In particular, the two leading responses to Beijing’s recent defense buildup and provocations in the East and South China Seas have been a ballyhooed U.S. “pivot” to East Asia aimed at conveying greater American resolve to China, and a broader American military spending rebound that’s being proposed by many lawmakers and pundits to create the deeds needed to more fully math Washington’s words.

But here’s what all factions in the foreign policy establishment keep forgetting – U.S. policies that for decades have boosted China’s economic strength and military wherewithal continue apace. Both President Obama – author of the pivot – and Congress’ Republican leaders have staunchly backed the offshoring-happy U.S. trade policies that have enabled Beijing to earn literally trillions of dollars by racking up massive trade surpluses with America. And they continue to ignore the massive transfers of advanced technology by American corporate giants that have enabled China to build both advanced weaponry and cyber-hacking capabilities.

So thanks to this whopping blind spot, U.S. leaders and much of the chattering class are determined to increase American forces’ exposure to a Chinese military machine that American businesses keep feeding, and to pressure the U.S. economy further by launching a military buildup that can be financed only by raising taxes and therefore threatening the already feeble recovery; by cutting domestic programs that arguably meet important needs at home; or by plunging the country even deeper into debt.

Some would blame this situation on a comeback in the corridors of power by a defense industry that used to be called the “merchants of death.” I’m convinced that the real culprit is a colossal failure of the imagination – which could be much more difficult to overcome.

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.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: America Caves at the China Dialogue

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China, currency manipulation, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, pivot, Strategic and Economic Dialogue, Trade, yuan

The latest U.S.-China Strategic & Economic Dialogue ended today, and both sides are acting as pleased as punch. I can see why Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang pronounced this session of the biannual high level talks as a “complete success.” Why the U.S. delegation agreed is beyond me, if you believe that Washington’s main purpose is to advance and protect critical American interests.

On the strategic side, the Americans insist that they’ve responded to China’s more aggressive assertion of territorial claims by reminding Beijing that the U.S. defense commitment to allies threatened by this muscle-flexing remains “deep.” But those allies will be forgiven for doubting American will because in his official closing statement to the press, Secretary of State John Kerry barely even glossed over the issue.

Even more important, these Obama administration officials gave no indication of any determination to change 20 years of U.S. trade and investment policies that (a) have given China so much of the financial wherewithal needed to launch a worrisome military buildup and (b) ensured that so much of China’s new weaponry would be so high tech. For good measure, years of reckless American corporate technology transfers unmistakably have helped create the Chinese cyberhacking capabilities that have attacked U.S. business, government, and even military computer systems. Which means that Obama policy will keep enriching and arming the very power against which it’s ostensibly pivoting.

On the economic side as such, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew disgracefully hailed as a “big change” some Chinese statements about scaling back their currency manipulation operations as conditions permit, even though close observers were quick to point out that this phrasing simply repeated current Chinese policy. That is, Beijing can now feel even freer to keep the yuan artificially undervalued as long as it views boosting exports as crucial to maintaining an acceptable pace of growth. With China now showing signs of backtracking from previously announced GDP targets, it’s clear that underselling its American and other competition for reasons having nothing to do with market forces will be necessary in Chinese eyes for many more months at least.

Moreover, even though China’s reputation as the world’s most corrupt major economy looks more richly deserved by the day, the United States renewed its determination to conclude a bilateral investment treaty with Beijing. The result can only be to expand this kleptocratic system’s economic footprint in America. Like the nation doesn’t have enough homegrown crony capitalism?

In fact, the U.S. cave-in was so complete that it’s easy to conclude that, from Washington’s standpoint, the Dialogue’s main purpose is not to advance or protect American interests. It’s to pull the wool over the American public’s eyes. And judging by the continued apathy from – and often outright enabling by – that public’s representatives in Congress, it keeps succeeding.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Why America’s China Strategy Would Have Dismayed the Founders

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China, Kerry. Asia, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, pivot, Strategic and Economic Dialogue, Trade

Although it’s been tough to access real-time coverage of the high level talks between the United States and China currently underway in Beijing, the opening remarks by American Secretary of State John Kerry and his Treasury counterpart, Jack Lew, make abundantly clear one prime reason that Washington keeps failing to promote or defend essential U.S. interests affected by China.

In my article yesterday for Fortune, I explained why the fundamental China strategy carried out by Washington since the 1970s is becoming dangerously out of date. The Kerry and Lew remarks, however, both perpetuate a specific, longstanding American myth about its approach to China and to diplomacy in general that’s a proven recipe for unnecessary foreign policy troubles.

The myth places maintaining relationships at or nearly at the center of U.S. foreign policy. Not that American diplomatic boilerplate never emphasizes the importance of shared specific interests among countries and building on them. It does. But it also so frequently stresses the importance of ongoing contacts, and the forms and processes that comprise them, that it often veers into mistakenly assuming that the mere declared existence of relationships per se creates the sense of mutual obligation that potentially represents their real value. As a result, the focus on relationships can obscure the paramount imperative of achieving vital specific U.S. objectives no matter their effect on a given relationship – and can result in their neglect.

Thus Kerry’s reference to a letter sent by President Obama to the two delegations urging them “to demonstrate to the world that even in a relationship as complex as ours we remain determined to ensure that cooperation defines the overall relationship.” At least as worrisome: Kerry’s attempts to reassure China of Washington’s benign intentions with his plea that Beijing recognize “[W]e may differ on one issue or another. But when we make that difference, do not interpret it as an overall strategy. It is a difference of a particular choice. And we need to be able to continue to put the importance of this relationship, the world’s two largest economies, we need to be able to understand the importance that we will play in choices for countries all across this planet.” Perhaps most disturbing of all was Kerry’s view that Sino-American differences must continue to be “constructively managed” (a phrase also used by Lew).

No one is urging the United States to respond coercively whenever it disagrees with allies or others, or to resort to coercion quickly or by a certain preset time. Instead, the challenge is making sure that “constructive management” doesn’t turn into excuse-making or enabling for the sake of broader benefits that may be wholly imaginary. Both current U.S. security and economic policies toward China indicate that this challenge has gone unmet.

For example, the temptation to maintain the relationship no matter the cost seems to be at least one major factor behind Washington’s failure to respond vigorously to China’s predatory trade practices – which have been conducted literally for decades to America’s economic detriment, and which have arguably worsened. America’s relatively timid reactions to China’s renewed belligerence in the South and East China Seas also appear to reflect U.S. leaders’ inability to sense when a supposed partner’s actions justify the diplomatic equivalent of divorce or even separation. It’s awfully difficult, moreover, to see how this relationship-based approach to China has resulted in payoffs America could not have reaped with a less touchy-feely strategy.

Successful diplomacy undoubtedly entails some degree of psychoanalysis, and can be aided by policymakers’ people skills and knack for reading counterparts. But national governments are not individuals. Indeed, since George Washington’s Farewell Address, American foreign policy realists have been warning their countrymen not entangle themselves in permanent foreign alliances (read “relationships”) and to avoid looking for “disinterested favors” from other nations – because their motivations are predominantly self-interested, and because they’ll therefore never be enduringly grateful. It was great advice for an age of imperialistic European monarchs and “Little Corporals” and it’s equally appropriate for dealing with 21st century Chinese revanchists.