Making News: New National Interest Article on Why the Foreign Policy Establishment Was Always Overrated

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academia, Afghanistan, alliances, Blob, Bretton Woods, China, Cold War, foreign policy establishment, forever wars, global financial crisis, globalism, Iran, liberal global order, Mainstream Media, Making News, Max Boot, Richard Haass, Soviet Union, The National Interest, think tanks

I’m pleased to announce that The National Interest has just published my latest article for an outside publication: an essay on why recent defenses of America’s bipartisan globalist foreign policy establishment (AKA, “The Blob”) wouldn’t hold any water even if this powerful, durable in-crowd hadn’t botched practically everything about Afghanistan. Here’s the link.

Also, a new twist today: Unfortunately, I thought some of the edits undermined the flow of the piece. I’m going to try to get at least some of them corrected. But in the meantime, to show careful readers what they were, I’m presenting below the draft as I sent it off. Let me know if you think I have some grounds for grousing. (P.S. I’m just fine with their title and love the subhead’s reference to the “poisoned well”!)

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

Why the Blob Really Has Been Unimpressive

by Alan Tonelson

So the Blob is starting to fight back. The bipartisan globalist national foreign policy establishment is being blamed both for President Biden’s hellaciously botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, and (including by the Blob-y Mr. Biden himself), for pushing the transformation of a necessary anti-terrorist operation into a naively grandiose nation-building project.

It’s time, the argument goes, to marginalize – or at least view more skeptically – this hodgepodge of former diplomats and Congressional aides, retired military officers, genuine academics, and think tank hacks that has shaped American diplomacy in two critical ways: by being used as the main personnel pool for staffing presidential administrations and House and Senate offices on rotating bases, and for serving up informal advisers for these politicians; and by dominating the list of sources used by overwhelmingly sympatico Mainstream Media journalists to report and interpret the news, and thus define for the public which foreign policy ideas are and aren’t legitimate to discuss.

“Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater!” Blob-ers are responding.

“The foreign policy establishment did get it wrong in Iraq, where the U.S. overreached,” allowed Richard Haass, who as President of the Council on Foreign Relations would arguably win a contest for Blob-er-in-Chief. “We got it wrong in Libya, we got it wrong in Vietnam. But over the last 75 years, the foreign policy establishment has gotten most things right.”

Washington Post pundit (and neoconservative apostate) Max Boot similarly has declared that “we can confidently say that, overall, the foreign policy establishment has served America well over the past 76 years.”

In other words, look past not only Afghanistan and Libya and Iraq and Vietnam but also the failure to anticipate the September 11 terrorist attack; and the long-time cluelessness about the emergence of security and economic threats from China (following the stubborn, decades-long determination to antagonize China after 1949); and a peacekeeping debacle in Somalia; and the Bay of Pigs fiasco; and the blind loyalty to an Iranian Shah hated by nearly all his subjects. Focus instead on all the – presumably more important – successes. (I’m excluding the numerous Blob-y decisions to back all manner of dictators, primarily in the developing world, and ignore human rights considerations because whatever their ethical flaws, only the Vietnam and Iran policies undermined American interests significantly.)

Paramount among them: victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War; the protectorate-alliances, foreign aid, and open trading system that keyed this triumph – in the process pacifying and democratizing Germany and Japan – fostering recovery in these former enemy dictatorships as well as the rest of Western Europe; and ushering in decades of record prosperity in these regions.

One obvious rejoinder: Today’s Blob and its most recent forerunners merit zero credit for those achievements because almost none of its members simply weren’t around or in power then. Meaning maybe America simply needs a more competent Blob?

At the same time, there’s inevitably been personnel continuity in the Blob’s ranks over time (think of recently deceased centenarian George Shultz, and the 98-year old Henry Kissinger, both still influential well into their golden years). Moreover, today’s establishment was largely groomed in Blob-y institutions, claims to be acting in that original Blob-y tradition, and has clearly remained stalwart in its advocacy of tireless international activism, and support for what it calls the liberal global order and its constituent institutions created by the older Blob generation. As a result, including those decades-old developments in judgements of today’s Blob is eminently defensible.

And in retrospect, what’s particularly revealing but neglected about these achievements is the extent to which they stemmed from circumstances almost ideally suited for foreign policy success, rather than from Blob-er genius. Globalists of the first post-World War II decades unquestionably faced serious domestic political obstacles to breaking with the country’s historic aloofness to most non-Western Hemispheric developments.

But they also enjoyed enviable advantages. Especially important was global economic predominance, which blunted much criticism on the home front by permitting subsidization of both the security and well-being of enormous foreign populations without apparent cost to American living standards or national finances.

It’s no coincidence, therefore, that as this advantage eroded, and the core Blob tactic of handling problems literally by throwing money at them and refusing to choose meaningfully between guns and butter became more problematic, the Blob’s record worsened – and undercut the intertwined domestic political and economic bases of active and passive public support for its strategies.

In fact, post-Vietnam, it’s difficult to identify any important foreign policy decision that Blob-y leaders have gotten right, or even handled reasonably well, with the exception of the first Persian Gulf War. (Ronald Reagan’s dramatic military buildup certainly helped spend and innovate the Soviets into collapse, but it was opposed by much and possibly most of the Blob, which favored continued containment and the simultaneous pursuit of arms control and detente.)

Just as important, this Blob’s very profligacy meant that many of its biggest post-Vietnam failures were economic in nature. Two leading examples – the messy collapse of the early World War II international monetary system and structural inflation and long sluggish growth that followed; and the 2007-09 global financial crisis and ensuing Great Recession.

Both crises were brought on fundamentally by global financial imbalances stemming from the Blob-ers’ stubborn refusal to support even minimal budget discipline on the foreign policy side; and from their failure to require reciprocal market access for traded goods either in the early post-World War II Bretton Woods monetary system or into its patchwork successors. And both revealed the Blob’s obliviousness to the intertwined imperatives of maintaining the national economic power needed to pay for their preferred policies responsibly; and of defining U.S. interests realistically enough to avoid needless costs and addiction to debt, inflation, or both.

Do today’s attacks, then, mean that the Blob’s demise is in sight? Not nearly likely enough. After all, it’s survived its decades-long string of blunders with its status pretty much intact. It’s bound to be keep being replenished by the same elite universities whose relevant faculty members are overwhelmingly Blob-y themselves. There’s no sign that their corporate funders are backing away from the think tanks that keep its many of its members employed when they’re out of public office. And its record will surely keep being reported principally by a news media that’s thoroughly Blob-y itself. That – frighteningly – leaves a foreign policy catastrophe inflicting lasting damage on the nation as America’s best hope for replacing the Blob even with simply a more genuinely diverse source of experience and expertise.

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Our So-Called Foreign Policy: How Much Change Will the Afghanistan Debacle Really Bring?

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Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, Biden, Central America, Donald Trump, failed states, globalism, Immigration, migration, nation-building, Northern Triangle, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, terrorism, The National Interest, Vietnam War

Since just yesterday, two big articles in the Mainstream Media have told us that President Biden’s latest speech on America’s (going-going-gone?) military involvement in Afghanistan could usher in a new, more circumspect era for U.S. foreign policy. (See here and here.) Me, I’m not so sure, even though I’d like to see nothing better, since I’ve been calling for such changes for no fewer than 35 years.

In fact, it’s not even clear whether Mr. Biden’s decision to pull the plug on this longest of America’s wars will profoundly influence America’s approach to world affairs on the level of day-to-day operations. For example, the President has insisted that “I was not going to extend this forever war. And I was not extending a forever exit”; and that with the Al Qaeda threat to attack the U.S. homeland and American allies squelched; and that the United States has “no vital interest in Afghanistan.” Nonethless, he still declared that “We will maintain the fight against terrorism in Afghanistan and other countries.”

Moreover, Mr. Biden acknowledged that the “over-the-horizon capabilities” that now enable attacks on “terrorists and targets” without fighting ground wars (through drone strikes and the like) will still require some “American boots on the ground.” That’s because you need some physical presence in order to identify and track the targets (which move around a lot), and because these forces need bases of some kind out of which to operate.

Further, the President claimed that “The terror threat has metastasized across the world, well beyond Afghanistan. We face threats from Al Shabab in Somalia, Al Qaeda affiliates in Syria and the Arabian Peninsula, and ISIS attempting to create a caliphate in Syria and Iraq and establishing affiliates across Africa and Asia.”

Even if he thinks that those over-the-horizon capabilities can suddenly meet this challenge (and obviously, they can’t now, or else we’d have seen a lot more of them and a much faster Afghanistan troop pullout), we’re talking about a non-trivial number of American boots on the ground in a huge number of countries – including more than a few states as failed, or as always-mythical, as Afghanistan.

President Biden was also pretty emphatic about “moving on” from what he suggested was the post-September 11 mindset of nation-building in places like Afghanistan – where democracy and unity and even cohesion has “never” existed.

But take another look at his “Strategy to Address the Root Causes of Migration in Central America.” The idea is to turn El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras into places acceptable enough to live in to convince huge portions of their populations to remain there, rather than seek better lives in the United States. And to achieve this aim, the administration’s blueprint “identifies, prioritizes, and coordinates actions to improve security, governance, human rights, and economic conditions in the region.”

That sounds pretty nation building-y to me, even if you believe that, unlike Afghanistan, these “Northern Triangle” countries have ever deserved to be called “nations” to begin with – rather than simply relatively large groups of very poor people exploited by (rotating) smaller groups of people possessing enough money and guns to climb to and stay on top for a while.

And since all the countries and regions that Mr. Biden has identified as new sources of terrorism suffer many of the same problems, there’s no reason to rule out the administration eventually dreaming up similar plans for them. According to the President’s speech, that would certainly be preferable to putting more American military boots on the ground.

But there’s a more fundamental reason to doubt that the President will engineer a major shift even in nation-building-type policies, much less in American foreign policy’s broader direction: Although the label didn’t emerge until after the September 11 attacks, nation-building has always been a core precept of the globalist approach that American foreign policy has carried out since Pearl Harbor, and Mr. Biden is a long-time card-carrying globalist. That’s the “back” to which he so proudly proclaimed America would return during his presidency.  

I explained what I mean by that most recently in a 2018 article for The National Interest. Globalism’s root assumption, I wrote, “has stemmed from the ostensibly timeless lessons of the nation’s 1930s indifference to aggression in Europe and Asia: that America’s security, freedom and prosperity are inseparable from the security, freedom and prosperity of a critical mass of the rest of the world in which trouble anywhere is sure to spread like wildfire unless checked.” And to prevent such contagions from emerging to begin with, “the entire global environment needed to be managed adequately” – including turning failed states and other breeding grounds for terrorism and all sorts of turmoil and instability into entities that are substantially better, or at least more tranquil.

That same article pointed out, however, that globalism’s grip on American foreign policy is so tight that even an avowed disrupter and America First champion like Donald Trump couldn’t shake it off completely – and even doubled down on some major globalist policies (like deepening America’s – nuclear – commitment to Europe’s security against Russian expansionism). Indeed, his Middle East and anti-terrorism policies were especially conflicted – as he himself admitted.

So the likeliest transformation I can envision for post-Afghanistan U.S. foreign policy is what I’ve called “globalism on the cheap” – retaining every ounce of this strategy’s grandiose objectives, but pretending that they can be pursued exclusively in neat, safe, and aesthetically appealing ways. In fact, this was the course chosen after another foreign policy debacle – the Vietnam War. And revealingly, Mr. Biden touted some of them yesterday: “diplomacy, economic tools, and rallying the rest of the world for support” (along with those over-the-horizon capabilities).

These and other tactics in principle can have their place in U.S. foreign policy, depending on circumstances. But calling them substitutes for major military deployments and operations in carrying out a globalist strategy is first-order misinformation spreading. And it makes me wonder just how damagingly globalism, on the cheap or otherwise, will need to fail before genuinely new foreign policy eras will begin.

 

Making News: Foreign Policy Overreach Post Re-Published by The National Interest

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Biden, defense budget, foreign policy, globalism, Lippmann Gap, Making News, national security, strategy, The National Interest

I’m pleased to announce that last Friday’s post about a major potential flaw in President Biden’s globalist foreign policy plans – and threat to U.S. national security – was re-published yesterday (with permission!) by The National Interest. I’d have put up this notice yesterday, but its appearance this soon caught me off guard.

All the same, click here in case you missed it, or if you’d like to see it in slightly modified form. I’d also be curious to know whether readers prefer the less personal and conversational style in this new version, or the original.

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

Making News: A New Piece on the U.S.-China Meeting, an Upcoming Radio Interview…& More!

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Alaska, Biden administration, China, Eamonn Fingleton, Making News, Market Wrap with Moe Ansari, The American Conservative, The National Interest, Trade, Trade Deficits

I’m pleased to announce that my latest article for an outside publication: a piece for The National Interest on the outcome of last week’s U.S.-China meeting in Alaska. Click here for an analysis that follows up my assessment of the session’s first day, and explains why Presiden Biden’s emissaries undermined America’s position vis-a-vis the People’s Republic.

Special background tidbit: My suggested headline was “Half-Baked in Alaska.” But media outlets themselves typically claim the final word on titles, and rightly so, since marketing considerations are involved. But I’d be curious whether RealityChek readers prefer The National Interest‘s choice or mine.

In addition, I’m scheduled to appear today on Moe Ansari’s nationally syndicated “Market Wrap” radio program to discuss the Alaska meeting and its implications yet further. The segment is likely to air at about 8:30 PM EST, and you can listen live at this link. As usual, if you’re not able to tune in, I’ll post a link to the podcast as soon as one’s available.

Finally, it was great to be quoted in veteran British economic journalist Eamonn Fingleton in his latest article for The American Conservative. Click here for an informative treatment of why America’s continuing, towering trade deficits matter decisively.

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

Making News: New Article on the GOP’s Future Now On-Line

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Capitol riots, conservatives, election 2020, GOP, impeachment, Making News, Republicans, The National Interest, Trump

I’m pleased to announce that my newest freelance article is on-line – an essay for The National Interest on the Republican party’s post-Trump and post-second-Trunp-impeachment future (and whether the former President is even likely to be left behind).

Here’s the piece, which I think you’ll find unusually interesting because of the poll results it describes about the demographic and ideological makeup of Trump voters last November. After all, they still comprise the vast bulk of Republicans. Please note: This is not a re-posting of a previous blog item. 

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

Making News: Trump “Requiem” Post Re-Published in The National Interest…& More!

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allies, Capitol riots, Cato Institute, China, Ciaran McGrath, conservatism, Croatia, Daily Express, Dnevno, economic nationalism, EU, European Union, Geopolitika, globalism, GOP, impeachment, Joe Biden, Making News, Populism, Republicans, Ted Galen Carpenter, The National Interest, Trump

I’m pleased to announce that The National Interest has re-posted (with permission!) my offering from last Wednesday that could be my last comprehensive look-back at President Trump and his impact on politics and policy (at least until the next utterly crazy development along these lines). Click here if you’d like to read in case you missed it, or if you’d like to see it in a more aesthetically pleasing form than provided here on RealityChek.

One small correction still needs to be made: The last sentence of the paragraph beginning with “Wouldn’t impeachment still achieve….” should end with the phrase “both laughable and dangerously anti-democratic.” I take the blame here, because my failure to keep track of the several versions that went back and forth.

In addition, it’s been great to see my post on the first sign of failure for President-Elect Joe Biden’s quintessentially globalist allies’-centric China strategy (also re-published by The National Interest) has been cited in new and commentary on both sides of the Atlantic.

Two of the latest came from Zagreb, Croatia. (And yes, I needed to look up which former region of the former Yugoslavia contained Zagreb – though I did know it was some place in the former Yugoslavia!) They’re found on the news sites Geopolitika and Dnevno.  (These sites must be related somehow because since it’s the same author, it must be the same article.)

On January 14, Ciaran McGrath of the London newpaper Daily Express used my analysis to sum up a column analyzing the Europe-China investment agreement that prompted my post in the first place.

And on January 5, the Cato Institute’s Ted Galen Carpenter (full disclosure: a close personal friend) cited my piece in a post of his expressing general agreement.

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

Making News: Biden China Setback Post Re-Published in The National Interest

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alliances, allies, China, EU, European Union, globalism, investment, Joe Biden, Making News, multilateralism, The National Interest

I’m pleased to announce that my recent RealityChek post on the European Union’s decision to sign an investment agreement with China, and how it’s trashed apparent President-elect Joe Biden’s globalist dreams of a multilateralist, allies-centric China policy, was re-published yesterday as a blog item by The National Interest. Click here to read – or re-read – with a snazzier layout!

And all throughout the year, keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Globalists Still Don’t Get It

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America First, Financial Times, Gideon Rachman, global leadership, globalism, international cooperation, international institutions, Joe Biden, multilateralism, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, The National Interest, Trump

It was tempting for me to react to Gideon Rachman’s column in yesterday’s Financial Times by noting, “At least he got it half right.” But this essay on Joe Biden’s determination to put U.S. foreign policy back on a globalist course isn’t even noteworthy by that modest standard.

For Rachman’s observation that a Biden administration is likely to find its goal of American global leadership much more difficult than expected to restore, and his conclusion that therefore the United States will have no choice to advance and protect its interests but to work via international institutions it can’t dominate and hope for the best, has been standard globalist fare for decades – as I’ve explained most recently and comprehensively here.

The crucial globalist mistake Rachman repeats entails what President Trump and his too-ragged pursuit of an America First strategy grasped in its essentials – that although the United States is far from strong (or wealthy, or wise) enough to achieve the central globalist goal of ensuring American security and prosperity by creating a fundamentally benign international environment, it is plenty strong and wealthy enough to achieve its essential interests through its own devices. The key is preserving and enhancing enough of that strength and wealth to maximize the odds of surviving and prospering in a world certain to remain dangerous or at least unstable.

To phrase this conclusion in globalist terms: The United States doesn’t need “global leadership” in the first place. It simply needs the capacity to take care of however it defines its own business.

An added virtue of this America First-y approach – success requires a lot less wisdom than globalism. That’s because (a) this strategy seeks to control what the nation can plausibly hope to control (its own affairs) instead of what it can’t plausibly hope to control (the affairs of everyone else); and (b) the United States’ favored (largely isolated) geographic position, its natural wealth, and its still formidable industrial and technoogical prowess endow it with a strong basis for withstanding and even thriving amid global turmoil that most other countries can only envy.

As I’ve also noted (in that National Interest article linked above) and elsewhere, the America First approach is needed even when working through those international institutions seems to be the nation’s best bet for coping with problems or maximizing opportunities. For as globalists (including Rachman in part) invariably miss is that the decision to foster “international cooperation” could even hope to be an automatic guarantee of favorable or even acceptable outcomes only if an objectively optimal solution for all concerned is already available and identifiable either by one or a group of the national governments involved, or by commonly accepted experts. Write me if you see any of these developments coming any time soon – even on a (rhetorically) widely agreed on worldwide “existential threat” like global warming.

In other words, for the foreseeable future, international institutions will be arenas of politics, not festivals of one-worldism, and international cooperation will have content. And if American leaders’ persuasive skills don’t suffice, for the best possible odds of mastering these politics and securing outcomes reflecting their country’s own distinctive interests and priorities, they’ll need to recognize that the former exist to begin with, and bring to bear the power (in all of its dimensions) needed to prevail satisfactorily. To cite a concept even globalists sometimes use, Washington will need to build and maintain and negotiate from “situations of strength.” But they’ll need to realize that these advantages are just as important in dealing with long-time allies and relatively benign neutrals as with adversaries like China and Russia.

The half of this cluster of issues Rachman gets right also includes his understanding that the American people will probably like the return to globalist-style multilateralism and cooperation even less than a Biden administration. But this insight isn’t exceptional, either, as his ultimate explanation for this resentment seems to be a neanderthal attachment to sovereignty by an electorate long viewed by globalists as too ignorant and unrealistic to acknowledge their superior wisdom.

And since, as Rachman correctly points out, Biden’s globalism is not only staunch, but pretty clueless itself, the nation will need considerable luck if his term in office avoids the debacles that so many of his pre-Trump predecessors created.

Making News: Analyzing the Post-Election Scene in The National Interest & on NYC Talk Radio

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Blue Wave, election 2020, Frank Morano, Joe Biden, Making News, The National Interest, The Other Side of Midnight, Trump, WABC AM

I’m pleased to announce two new media hits during the last week. First, yesterday, The National Interest published an essay of mine setting out some initial thoughts on where American politics stands in the immediate aftermath of Joe Biden’s apparent election as President and the failure of a widely predicted Blue Wave to crush Trump-ism or swamp the House and Senate. Here’s the link. It’s a modified version of my Wednesday RealityChek post, but I think regulars will find it a valuable read along, with others.

Second, in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, Frank Morano interviewed me on the new political landscape on his WABC-AM New York City radio show “The Other Side of Midnight.” The podcast wasn’t posted till yesterday, but you can listen to the segment at this site. Click on the topmost “The Election is still not over….” episode. My segment begins at about the 23:40 mark.

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

Making News: New Article on Why I Voted for Trump

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Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, censorship, China, Conservative Populism, conservatives, Democrats, economic nationalism, election 2020, entertainment, environment, freedom of expression, freedom of speech, George Floyd, Hollywood, Hunter Biden, Immigration, industrial policy, Joe Biden, Josh Hawley, journalism, Mainstream Media, Making News, Marco Rubio, police killings, regulation, Republicans, Robert Reich, Russia-Gate, sanctions, Silicon Valley, social media, supply chains, tariffs, taxes, technology, The National Interest, Trade, trade war, Trump, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Ukraine, Wall Street, wokeness

I’m pleased to announce that The National Interest journal has just published a modified version of my recent RealityChek post explaining my support for President Trump’s reelection. Here’s the link.

The main differences? The new item is somewhat shorter, it abandons the first-person voice and, perhaps most important, adds some points to the conclusion.

Of course, keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.