Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Is Trump Isolating the U.S. in Asia? Apparently No One’s Told the Asians

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alliances, Asia, Australia, Barack Obama, China, India, Japan, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, Susan Rice, TPP, Trade, Trans-Pacific Partnership, Trump

Ever since President Trump kept his campaign promise and nixed U.S. participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement, America’s chattering classes have been charging that his decision has opened the door wide to China to expand its influence in East Asia at America’s expense, and shunted the United States to the sidelines of the regional and international economy. Mr. Trump’s just completed visit to Asia has revived all these accusations – and not so coincidentally, afforded yet another opportunity to demonstrate just how ludicrous they are.

Most embarrassingly, if the president’s approach to “this vital region,” in the words of Barack Obama’s national security adviser, Susan E. Rice, even has much potential to leave “the United States more isolated and in retreat, handing leadership of the newly christened “Indo-Pacific” to China on a silver platter,” no one seems to have told Asia’s leading powers. For they have been hard at work helping Washington develop a new grouping that’s obviously aimed at frustrating Beijing’s ambitions.

So even as Rice and the rest of the foreign policy establishment were bemoaning the United States’ supposedly declining influence in the first year of the Trump presidency, representatives of Japan, Australia, and India were meeting with American counterparts in the Philippines, site of the latest series of regional summits, to breathe life into longstanding plans to foster greater cooperation among their four democracies.

And if you don’t think that the effort is amply capable of worrying the Chinese, don’t take my word for it. Take China’s. Just as the meeting was concluding, Beijing was out with a statement warning that no joint ventures among regional countries should target or damage a “third party’s interest.”

Just as interesting: Plans for such a “Quadrilateral Security Dialogue” were first advanced by Japan in 2007. But Australia and India weren’t especially interested – the former for fear of antagonizing the Chinese. Apparently nothing that Washington did during the ensuing Obama years changed their minds. Now, however, they’re at the table.

At least two overlapping developments appear to be responsible. First and most unmistakably, America’s pushback against China under Obama on both the national security and economic fronts was so feeble and ineffective that the PRC’s power grew tremendously. So the Australians and Indians no doubt now view the need to contain China more seriously. Second, it’s entirely possible that President Trump’s indications that the United States will no longer assume the bulk of the burden and risk of maintaining Asian security while getting shafted continuously by Asian trade policies has convinced those two countries in particular that they’d better get into a proactive mode.

And maybe most interesting of all, the Trump decision to exit TPP (whose signatories included Australia and Japan) apparently did nothing to discourage Canberra, New Delhi, or Tokyo from teaming up with the United States.

The main reason could not be more obvious (except to the American establishment): Keeping America engaged however possible is the only alternative conceivable for the time being to greater Chinese control. And herein lies a crucial lesson that Mr. Trump may have grasped but that his establishment critics have unmistakably ignored: The United States is not a superpower because of what it does on the world stage. It’s a superpower because of what it is.

That is, the source of American strength is not how many alliances it joins or trade treaties it signs or international regimes it creates – or even how many conflicts it enters. Instead, the source is strength itself – in all of its interlocking forms: military, economic, and technological.

So as long as the United States maintains this strength – which of course can be and has been greatly undercut by the kind of Asian mercantilism winked at by American presidents for decades but protested loudly by President Trump – it will remain a player wherever it wishes. But nothing is likelier to limit America’s global reach – and threaten its interests – than the apparent establishment belief that international activism per se can somehow substitute for power.

Not that I’m a supporter of what may be an emerging American strategy here. For as I’ve written, the nation’s essential interests in East Asia are economic – creating satisfactory terms of trade and commerce. And as long as the United States serves as an irreplaceable final market for Asia’s export-heavy economies (that is, as long as it remains soundly and sustainably wealthy), it will be able to lever that power to achieve its goals whoever runs Asia politically.

And as I’ve also written, East Asia’s major powers (e.g., Australia, Japan, and India) should be strong enough, especially together, to resist China’s designs on their own. Further, to give them an extra edge, the United States can always sell them advanced weapons, and if need be drop its insistence that they forswear (in the case of Australia, Japan, and South Korea) nuclear weapons.

But if Mr. Trump is going to double down on the United States’ traditional strategy of Asia’s stabilizer and defender, his apparent understanding – expressed most often during the campaign – that America’s economic ties with the region will need to change dramatically provides the only hope of enduring success.

Following Up: Britain’s May is Moving – Though Too Slowly – to Define the Real Terrorism Problem

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Barack Obama, Following Up, Islam, Islamism, London Bridge attacks, Manchester bombing, multiculturalism, Muslims, Susan Rice, terrorism, terrorists, Theresa May, This Week with George Stephanopoulos, travel ban, Trump, United Kingdom

British Prime Minister Theresa May’s remarks following Saturday night’s London Bridge attacks include one of the most forthright, perceptive, and necessary statements from an international leader (excepting President Trump) about the difficulties free societies face in combating terrorist acts committed by Muslims.

Specifically, these comments appear to recognize that these abominations are not simply the product of individuals having nothing whatever to do with their co-religionists, or with the supposedly peaceful, law-abiding, thoroughly assimilated – in other words, utterly unexceptional – communities they comprise. That is, May has closely approached stating that something is decidedly, and often dangerously, abnormal in too many of the Islamic neighborhoods and congregations found in the non-Islamic world, and particularly in the United Kingdom and in the rest of Europe.

As the Prime Minister declared, “While we have made significant progress in recent years, there is – to be frank – far too much tolerance of [Islamist extremism] in our country. So we need to become far more robust in identifying it and stamping it out – across the public sector and across society. That will require some difficult and often embarrassing conversations, but the whole of our country needs to come together to take on this extremism – and we need to live our lives not in a series of separated, segregated communities but as one truly United Kingdom.”

That last clause is extraordinarily important. As I wrote in the wake of last month’s suicide bombing in Manchester, the United Kingdom has officially glorified multiculturalism to such a degree that it has encouraged in many ways the emergence of Muslim population clusters with considerable degrees of autonomy from even the legal system – let alone the values – that holds in the rest of the country.  

May unmistakably has now attacked those policies, and by extension the assumption behind them:  that many of the core teachings of Islam are no better and no worse than those developed in the British Isles throughout their long history. They are simply different. As a result, if certain Muslims living in Britain wish, say, to govern family life with the precepts of their faith rather than British law, they should enjoy ample freedom to do so. Indeed, denying them these rights in the absence of clear and present dangers to – to what, it’s not entirely clear; certainly not the freedoms enjoyed in Britain by other individuals, like women – would be the antithesis of liberty and tolerance.

Yesterday, May strongly suggested that in practice, this segregation has created major dangers at least to national security and public order. And she deserves immense credit for recognizing that, however “difficult and embarrassing” pluralistic democracies like her country may find creating a more united United Kingdom, a concerted effort must not only be made – it must succeed.

Nevertheless, I worry that May herself is still a bit too embarrassed to identify the main problem. For along with describing the enemy belief system as “Islamist,” she also insisted that “It is an ideology that is a perversion of Islam.” Which, if you view as legitimate her alarm at segregated Muslim communities, is a little too neat.

After all, if extremist Islamism indeed “perverts” Islam, presumably this offense would be readily apparent to the vast majority of Muslims themselves. And not only would these segregated communities refuse to tolerate it, and be joining with the national authorities in “identifying it and stamping it out” (May’s own words, as per above). An outraged Muslim majority would be taking the lead in these matters.

But nothing could be more obvious than the general failure of Muslims anywhere to fit this description. Instead, as the Prime Minister herself complains, there has been “too much tolerance,” and the most dangerous manifestations are in those communities whose segregated nature produces Islam in a form relatively un-polluted by British and other non-Islamic values (whatever you suppose them to be).

So May has a ways to go before the clarification of thought that necessarily precedes any course of action with a reasonable hope for success. But she’s clearly much further along than much of the American leadership class. Take Susan E. Rice, national security adviser to former President Obama. On ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, she was asked about President Trump’s proposal to suspend travel to the United States from a handful of majority Muslim countries that the Obama administration itself viewed as either overrun with terrorists or ruled by terrorist-sponsoring regimes. She explained her continued opposition (which is also shared by her former boss) in part this way:

“[I] think there’s a very real risk that by stigmatizing and isolating Muslims from particular countries and Muslims in general that we alienate the very communities here in the United States whose cooperation we most need to detect and prevent these homegrown extremists from being able to carry out the attacks.”

Leave aside your views on the travel ban proposal for or against. First of all, I’ve never been comfortable with the suggestion just made above (and by so many others) that there’s something fundamentally acceptable about residents of the United States (and especially citizens) conditioning their cooperation with law enforcement authorities that are combating violence on whether or not they feel stigmatized in some way by Washington, or any level of government. Are you? And remember – nearly all Muslims resident in the United States live here legally, so it’s not as if they need fear deportation like so many illegal Hispanic residents, or Hispanics here legally here with illegal friends or relatives.

But more important is Rice’s obliviousness to a glaringly obvious implication of her statement: Why, in the first place, are Muslim communities “the very communities here in the United States whose cooperation we most need to detect and prevent…homegrown extremists from being able to carry out the attacks”? It’s because so many of the actual attackers and attacker wanna-bes are coming from those communities. Obviously something about them has gone seriously wrong.

I’m not saying I know exactly what needs to be done domestically on top of existing efforts, and how new programs can be squared with essential Constitutional protections. It’s also clear that the United States doesn’t have the kind of related assimilation-segregated communities problems plaguing the United Kingdom and so much of Europe. But I do know that the more solidly the more extreme versions of multiculturalism take root in America, the larger these problems will grow. And the sooner the British more explicitly acknowledge major problems among their compatriots who practice mainstream Islam, the faster they’ll restore acceptable levels of safety to their concert halls, historic bridges, and the rest of their country.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Why the Iran Deal (So Far) Worries Me

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allies, Biden, European Union, Iran, Iran deal, Iran talks, Kerry, Middle East, nuclear weapons, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, sanctions, Saudi Arabia, Shiites, State Department, Sunnis, Susan Rice

I still haven’t yet examined all the statements made by participants about the nuclear weapons deal announced yesterday by the United States, five other major world powers, the European Union, and Iran. So I can’t comment on all of the possible loopholes created by the agreement, which include differing interpretations of its provisions by the signatories (not to mention the inevitable discrepancies among wording in different languages, plus any that might be deliberately created by the various governments involved). In fact, as far as I can tell, no actual agreement text has been made public by the Obama administration. The only official U.S. document I’ve seen is this description posted on the White House website.

So like most of us, I’m somewhat hamstrung in evaluating the accord – which, to complicate matters further, is a work in progress, that everyone acknowledges leaves many critical details up in the air. Further, I’m no expert in the technology involved in producing nuclear weapons and peaceful nuclear energy.

All the same, what I know of the deal worries me as much today as it did the day before its unveiling. My main – non-technical – concerns:

>Iran is an awfully big country – the world’s 18^th largest. At more than 636,000 square miles, it’s just under 18 percent the size of the United States, and slightly less than 2.5 times bigger than Texas. A country that big will contain a great many hiding places, and will be challenging for the international community to monitor.

>All of the strategic conditions that, at least in principle, have been driving the Iranians to develop so many of the capabilities for building nuclear weapons remain firmly in place. Their theocracy represents a hated minority sect located in a region demographically dominated by its main theological rivals – which include not only large countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, but unspeakably violent terrorist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda and its various offshoots.

At least as important, Iran has used force to challenge the United States, which has in recent years toppled adversary regimes in Iraq and Libya, and has worked hard to oust the Assad dictatorship in Syria. Even a small nuclear arsenal would practically ensure the Iranian regime’s indefinite survival against its most powerful foreign threat by far.

And don’t forget – Iran’s neighborhood is overwhelmingly likely to remain hostile and dangerous long after the end of the various fixed-term provisions envisioned by the framework.  Therefore, going nuclear could still just as strongly appeal even to a future Iranian regime much more moderate than today’s.

>America’s foreign policy team doesn’t even deserve to be called the JV. Secretary of State Kerry was known during his Senate career as a “showhorse,” not a “workhorse.” And even with a strong legislative record on Capitol Hill, there is no reason to consider him anywhere near a match for Iranian negotiators. Like Vice President Biden, he’s traveled extensively, and accumulated much face time with foreign leaders. Whether either of them has learned anything useful from these experiences is not entirely clear. As for national security advisor Susan Rice, she’s simply a climber devoid of any substantive accomplishment.  Her career has been nothing more than a monument to over-promotion and possibly racial tokenism. And then there’s the president himself, who of course, had amassed only a half a Senate term’s worth of national policy-making experience before winning the White House in 2008.

Has foreign policy experience been any guarantee of good results for the United States? Hardly. It was the “best and the brightest,” after all, who led the nation into Vietnam and other debacles. What’s worrisome about the current administration is that it’s a combination of down-the-line (liberal) establishment thinkers completely lacking in any meaningful private sector or other real-world experience, and the wisdom and judgment they usually nurture.

>As has widely been noted, the Obama administration is heavily invested in Iran deal’s success for many reasons. Both the president and Kerry clearly have the legacy thing on their minds – both in the positive sense of achieving an historic and enduring breakthrough, and in the negative sense of burnishing records that look decidedly bleak so far. How enthusiastic will the president and his aides be to conclude that Iran is cheating? In fact, between now and the next (June 30) deadline, how plausible is it that they’ll hold fast on the framework’s decisive conditions when firmness could blow up an enterprise on which they’ve worked so hard for so long?  

Add to these influences – to which all politicians, and other human beings, are subject – the strong tendency of the State Department, the diplomatic establishment, and their Mainstream Media enablers to value perpetuating diplomatic “processes” at least as much as achieving results. Just think of how the endless, on-and-off Israeli-Palestinian peace talks are continually described. Not that it’s out of bounds to believe that “talking is better than fighting.” But time is not necessarily America’s friend here – both because of Israeli threats to solve the problem militarily, and because of the related likelihood of continuing Iranian progress toward weapon-ization.

>America’s allies in keeping Iran nuclear weapons-free are hardly known for steadfastness. The European Union and most of its individual members have been ambivalent enough about responding to Russia’s expansionism over the last year – and that’s a threat in their own neighborhood. Economics looks like the most powerful explanation. The continent is stagnating economically, and even though Russia is no giant on the global economic stage, it’s been a major market, and fuel supplier, for many European countries – notably Germany. Growth-starved European economies are bound to be just as tempted by potential customers in Iran. As a result, it’s not just President Obama who could be reluctant to accuse Tehran of cheating. Many allies could be equally unwilling. Which means that, barring the most frightening and flagrant examples of Iranian cheating on a final nuclear agreement, the threat of promptly and completely reimposing sanctions to punish agreement violations looks ominously empty. 

>Finally, the administration’s explanation of why Iran has come this far literally sounds too good to be true, especially given the existential advantages Tehran would create for itself by going nuclear. As Mr. Obama has made clear, he doesn’t believe that sanctions possible in current circumstances by themselves can change Iran’s nuclear plans. He has repeatedly stated that using force in the Middle East has usually been a disastrous mistake for the United States in recent years. Yet he credits current sanctions with, first, seriously committing Iran into a diplomatic exercise aimed expressly at eliminating any nuclear option and, second, with producing Iran’s signature onto a framework fully capable (as the president sees it) of achieving this epochal objective.

I readily concede that the sanctions have hurt Iran economically. Yet as a friend reminded me a few weeks ago, it’s a country for which levels of economic privation unknown to Americans are still a warm memory. The population’s ability to endure further hardships shouldn’t be underestimated – especially considering the national power it could bring and the pride it could foster. Indeed, Russia may be teaching Washington a lesson in economic resilience right now.

But let’s close on an encouraging note. The Wall Street Journal today reported that, as the Iran talks have proceeded, the Obama Pentagon has been upgrading its biggest bunker buster bombs – weapons that can be used in principle to destroy even heavily protected Iran nuclear facilities. Perhaps despite much evidence to the contrary, when administration officials keep saying that they’re not operating in a perfect world, they really do know it.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Wishful Thinking Dominates Both Sides of the Iran Nukes Debate

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airstrikes, Binyamin Netanyahu, Iran, Israel, John Kerry, nuclear weapons, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, sanctions, Susan Rice

If you want to become totally depressed, try following the heated debate over efforts to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons – which of course came to a head today (for now) with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s speech to a joint session of Congress over the objections of the Obama administration.

This debate is depressing because none of the major participants seem to have an especially promising strategy for keeping Iran’s dangerous regime non-nuclear, at least not for the foreseeable future. In fact, the two most prominent blueprints – advanced by President Obama and by Mr. Netanyahu – seem to place excessive faith in economic sanctions to produce a long-term solution, albeit for dramatically different reasons.

The American position in the current negotiations assumes that the best strategy to achieve a non-nuclear Iran entails (a) promising to ease and eventually end current sanctions depending on the regime’s adherence to any agreement, and (b) threatening to intensify sanctions if the present talks fail. In addition, the Obama administration insists that it has not ruled out military action against Iran’s nuclear program if it concludes that sanctions have been unsuccessful as well.

Secretary of State John Kerry has been leading the American diplomatic effort, and wrote in a Washington Post op-ed last June, “All along, these negotiations have been about a choice for Iran’s leaders. They can agree to the steps necessary to assure the world that their country’s nuclear program will be exclusively peaceful and not be used to build a weapon, or they can squander a historic opportunity to end Iran’s economic and diplomatic isolation and improve the lives of their people.”

In Kerry’s apparent view, this offer is too good for Iran’s leaders to pass up. As he wrote, if it agrees to forswear weaponizing their nuclear program, and to the measures needed to verify compliance, that nation “will be able to use its significant scientific know-how for international civil nuclear cooperation. Businesses could return to Iran, bringing much needed investment, jobs and many additional goods and services. Iran could have greater access to the international financial system. The result would be an Iranian economy that begins to grow at a significant and sustainable pace, boosting the standard of living among the Iranian population. If Iran is not ready to do so, international sanctions will tighten and Iran’s isolation will deepen.”

The problem is that Kerry could well be overlooking compelling reasons for Iran’s leaders to value becoming a nuclear weapons state over the benefits of reintegrating with the global economy and political system. These benefits would be especially important for an Iran determined to maximize its influence in the Middle East through means that include supporting terrorism and other forms of violence. Specifically, a nuclear arsenal and the means to deliver warheads throughout the region could effectively give Tehran the retaliatory capability to deter any American or Israeli counter-strikes. Longer-range delivery systems, including those that could reach the United States, would give Iran even greater scope to pursue its agenda. As I have written, the acquisition of such intercontinental capabilities is threatening to give North Korea this degree of deterrence, and to destroy the foundations of America’s security strategy in the Far East.

Yet President Obama’s critics, including Mr. Netanyahu, may be harboring equally unrealistic expectations of sanctions. In late 2013, he criticized America’s Iran strategy for granting Iran “relief from sanctions after years of a grueling sanctions regime. They got that. They are paying nothing because they are not reducing in any way their nuclear enrichment capability.”

Speaking to American lawmakers today, Netanyahu made even clearer his confidence in both the sanctions that he believe should not have been lifted, and of those that could still be imposed:

“Iran’s nuclear program can be rolled back well-beyond the current proposal by insisting on a better deal and keeping up the pressure on a very vulnerable regime, especially given the recent collapse in the price of oil. Now, if Iran threatens to walk away from the table — and this often happens in a Persian bazaar — call their bluff. They’ll be back, because they need the deal a lot more than you do. And by maintaining the pressure on Iran and on those who do business with Iran, you have the power to make them need it even more.

And of course using the threat of harsher sanctions allegedly more effectively than the administration has was at the heart of the recent bipartisan Senate bill that was co-sponsored by 16 Senators upon its introduction.

But why does Netanyahu, who has assailed the Obama administration’s ostensibly shortsighted decade-or-so Iran time frame, believe that oil prices will remain low, especially over the long run? And why does he seem so confident that the Europeans and others, whose cooperation is essential for sanctions to exert genuine pain, will buy in for as long as is necessary? Surely he can’t be basing this optimism on Europe’s response to Russia’s campaign against Ukraine.

Scarily, this analysis seems to point – logically at least – to military strikes as the best means of preventing Iran’s nuclear-ization. And “best” here isn’t a synonym for “good” or even “feasible.” I’ll leave the purely military analysis to others with more expertise. But even recognizing the major risks and the long odds, it does seem that the Obama administration undervalues the most plausible benefits.

It’s true, as Kerry has said that, “You can’t bomb knowledge into oblivion unless you kill everybody. You can’t bomb it away.” But that’s the wrong standard for success. If Iran’s most important nuclear facilities are vulnerable to air attack (a crucial “if”), then destroying or disabling them would serve the objective – which should never to be underestimated in this tragically flawed world – of buying time. And if and whenever Iran is able to reconstitute a critical mass of its nuclear capabilities, the best option may be resuming attacks.

The military option could also move Iran’s toward the kinds of compromises that it’s so far resisted – including a massively intrusive inspection regime that, incidentally, would have to function in a much more streamlined and seat-of-the-pants manner than its predecessors, to avoid lengthy controversies about documenting violations that Tehran could exploit to make weapon-ization progress. But the case for airstrikes shouldn’t depend exclusively, or even heavily, on diplomatic hopes, much less on expectations of regime change. In other words, Americans may need to start viewing the Iran nuclear threat not as a problem to be solved, but as a condition that needs to be managed in forceful – and frankly dangerous – ways. And that’s if we’re lucky.