Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Case for a “Made in America” Approach

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Africa, AIDS, border security, climate change, corruption, diseases, foreign policy, foreign policy establishment, globalism, HIV, human rights, internationalism, Iran, Iran deal, Islamic terrorism, Israel, Jeffrey Goldberg, Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Middle East, missile defense, nuclear proliferation, oil, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, population control, Project-Syndicate.org, shale, terrorism, The New York Times, Thomas Friedman

I’m picking on New York Times uber-pundit Thomas Friedman again today – not because of any personal animus, but because, as noted yesterday, he’s such an effective, influential creator of and propagandist for the conventional wisdom on so many public policy fronts. And just to underscore that it’s nothing personal, I’ll also put in my cross-hairs another, though lower profile, thought leader: Harvard political scientist Joseph S. Nye, Jr. The reason? Both recently have provided us with quintessential illustrations of how lazy – and indeed juvenile – the justifications for American international activism served up by the bipartisan foreign policy establishment have grown.

The analyses I’m talking about aren’t quite as childishly simplistic as the establishment theme I wrote about last month – the assumption that American involvement in alliances and international organizations and regimes is automatically good, and that withdrawal or avoidance is automatically bad. But because it’s a little more sophisticated, it can be even more harmful. It’s the insistence that whenever the United States faces a problem with an international dimension, the remedy is some form of international engagement.

A recent Friedman column revealed one big weakness with this assumption: It often logically leads to the conclusion that a problem is utterly hopeless, at least for the foreseeable future. Just think about the only sensible implications of this October 31 article, which insists that the apparently metastasizing threat of Islamic terrorism in Africa can’t be adequately dealt with through the military tools on which the Trump administration is relying.

Why not? “Because what is destabilizing all of these countries in the Sahel region of Africa and spawning terrorist groups is a cocktail of climate change, desertification — as the Sahara steadily creeps south — population explosions and misgovernance.

“Desertification is the trigger, and climate change and population explosions are the amplifiers. The result is a widening collapse of small-scale farming, the foundation of societies all over Africa.”

I have no doubt that Friedman is right here. And as a result, he has a point to slam the Trump administration “for sending soldiers to fight a problem that is clearly being exacerbated by climate and population trends….” (That’s of course a prime form of American international activism.)

But he veers wildly off course in suggesting that other forms of such activism – “global contraception programs,” “U.S. government climate research” and the like are going to do much good, especially in the foreseeable future. Unless he supposes that, even if American policies turned on a dime five or even ten years ago, Africa would be much less of a mess? The only adult conclusion possible is that nothing any government can do is going to turn the continent into something other than a major spawning ground for extremism and refugees.

And this conclusion looks especially convincing considering the African problem to which Friedman – and so many other supporters of such approaches – gives short shrift: dreadfully corrupt governments. For this is a problem that has afflicted Africa since the countries south of the Sahara began gaining their independence from European colonialists in the late-1950s. (And the colonialists themselves weren’t paragons of good government, either.)

So I’m happy to agree that we shouldn’t pretend that sending American special forces running around Africa helping local dictators will actually keep the terrorists under control (although as I’ve argued in the case of the Middle East, such deployments could helpfully keep them off balance). But let’s not pretend that anything Friedman supports will help, either – at least in the lifetime of anyone reading this.

Nye has held senior government foreign policy posts in Democratic administrations and, in the interests of full disclosure, we have crossed swords in print – mainly about the proper definition of internationalism and about a review of an anthology he edited that he didn’t like (which doesn’t seem to be on-line). But I hope you agree that there’s still a big problem with his November 1 essay for Project-Syndicate.org about the implications of America’s domestic energy production revolution for the nation’s approach to the Middle East.

In Nye’s words: “Skeptics have argued that lower dependence on energy imports will cause the US to disengage from the Middle East. But this misreads the economics of energy. A major disruption such as a war or terrorist attack that stopped the flow of oil and gas through the Strait of Hormuz would drive prices to very high levels in America and among our allies in Europe and Japan. Besides, the US has many interests other than oil in the region, including nonproliferation of nuclear weapons, protection of Israel, human rights, and counterterrorism.”

Two related aspects of this list of reasons for continued American engagement in the region stand out. First, it’s completely indiscriminate. And second, for this reason, it completely overlooks how some of these unmistakably crucial U.S. interests can be much more effectively promoted or defended not through yet more American intervention in this increasingly dysfunctional region, but through changes in American domestic policies.

For instance, we’re (rightly) worried about nuclear proliferation, especially in Iran? How can today’s engagement policy help? Even if the the current Iran nuclear deal works exactly as intended, what happens when it runs out? Should we simply assume that Tehran will be happy to keep its nuclear genie in a bottle for another fifteen years? Will Iran be persuaded to give up the nuclear option permanently if Washington cultivates even closer ties with its age-old Sunni Muslim enemies, like Saudi Arabia?

Although I’m a missile defense skeptic – especially when it comes to the near-term threat from North Korea – isn’t figuring out a more effective way to repel an Iranian strike more likely to protect the American homeland? It’s certainly a response over which the United States will have much more control – and indeed, any control. In addition, if the United States withdraws militarily from the Persian Gulf region, Iran’s reason for launching such an attack in the first place fades away and, as I’ve argued in the case of North Korea, America’s own vastly superior nuclear forces become a supremely credible deterrent for any other contingencies.

Of course the United States faces a big Middle East-related terrorism problem. But as I’ve argued previously, the keys to America’s defense are serious border security measures. They, too, pass the “control test” with flying colors, and consequently seem much more promising than the status quo approach of trying to shape the region’s future in more constructive ways. But as I’ve also written, it would also make sense to keep in the Middle East small-scale American forces whose mission is continually harassing ISIS and Al Qaeda and whatever other groups of vicious nutballs are certain to appear going forward.

Nye’s point about the integration of global energy markets is a valid one. But in the same article, he acknowledges how the U.S. domestic energy revolution’s “combination of entrepreneurship, property rights, and capital markets” has changed the game for America. Why does he suppose that its effects won’t spread significantly beyond our borders?

As for Nye’s other two reasons for continued U.S. Middle East engagement, the notion that Washington can do anything meaningful to promote the cause of human rights simply isn’t serious, and Israel has amply demonstrated that, with enough American military aid, it can take care of itself.

Moreover, as you may recognize, the arguments for mainly focusing on border security to handle the Middle East terrorist threat applies to the African menace that’s preoccupying Friedman.

The main takeaway here isn’t that U.S. international engagement will never be needed to protect national security, safeguard the nation’s independence, or enhance its prosperity. It’s that Made in America approaches will turn out to be vastly superior in many cases – and certainly in many more cases than the bipartisan globalist foreign policy establishment recognizes. How long will it take for President Trump to get fully on board?

By the way, I first began exploring the idea of Made in America solutions to foreign policy problems and international threats when I read this article by current Atlantic Monthly Editor Jeffrey Goldberg. He argued in 1999 that the nation was making a big mistake ignoring Africa in its diplomacy because the continent was likely to become a source of deadly diseases sure to cross oceans and eventually afflict Americans and others; that “H.I.V., of course, is a particularly vicious warning shot”; and that it was high time for Washington to deal with “poverty, poor sanitation and political instability” as well as put “a global system of public health and disease surveillance in place.”

Not that Goldberg presented a stark either-or choice, but my reaction was “If we do need to figure out whether to place more AIDS-fighting emphasis on promoting African economic development, or on finding a cure through medical research, isn’t the latter much likelier to deliver major results much sooner?”

As is clear from the Friedman article, Africa’s array of problems continues unabated. And according to no less than the (devoutly globalist) Obama administration, as of last year, the United States was “on the right track to reach most of its “National HIV/AIDS Strategy” goals for 2020 – which seek an America that’s “a place where new HIV infections are rare” and where “high quality, life-extending care” is available.

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(What’s Left of) Our Economy: The Multinationals’ Supply Chain Hypocrisy

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creative destruction, globalization, investment, multinational corporations, NAFTA, North American Free Trade Agreement, supply chains, tax reform, Thomas Friedman, Trade, Trump, {What's Left of) Our Economy

It’s widely contended in coverage and commentary about President Trump’s efforts to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), some of his administration’s key proposals could disrupt the global supply chains that multinational companies from all over the world have set up in recent decades to produce their goods at the lowest possible total cost. The same criticism has come up in connection with a provision of the (current) Trump tax reform plan that would impose a levy on the cross-border purchases of goods purchases by these companies’ domestic operations from their foreign operations (e.g., parts and components of manufactures that are turned into final products).

On the one hand, this is all understandable. If new tariffs are approved to penalize production outside the NAFTA zone, or if new tax code provisions accomplish the same tasks, networks of factories and other facilities that multinationals have spent big bucks setting up could need to move – in the process saddling the firms with yet more expenses.

On the other hand, these claims make no sense at all – at least if you’ve taken seriously the conventional wisdom about multinationals that’s prevailed since these supply chains came into being. For this notion insisted that, because of the natural evolution of the global economy, and of business, and of the interaction between the two, these companies had become free to hopscotch around the world seeking countries to host their facilities that offered the most favorable business environments. And if those environments deteriorated, the “footloose” multinationals would simply pick up stakes and move to more inviting locations.

As a result, countries at the very least needed to keep on their economic policy toes. At most, they’d need to keep improving their business environments – because countries all over the world were competing for the precious capital, jobs, growth opportunities, and knowhow that they offered. The most vivid expression of this idea was the “Golden Straitjacket” theory advanced by New York Times uber-pundit Thomas Friedman. As he wrote, countries that ran their economies based on free-market (aka U.S.-style) rules and practices (roughly his definition of the Straitjacket) would be rewarded with abundant investment that would fuel their economic development and raise their living standards. Those that ignored these rules would be shunned.

Indeed, Friedman even colorfully called the sources of this capital “the electronic herd” – an image that connotes both high levels of mobility generally, and a strong inclination to move to greener pastures whenever they beckoned. (In fairness, this electronic herd, strictly speaking, referred to high flying financiers who commanded vast amounts of “hot money” – highly liquid capital that could be sent across borders with the click of a mouse. But for his Straitjacket theory to achieve its promised benefits, businesses in the less mobile real economy would need to adopt much the same model, too, and indeed pursue the opportunities created by the Herd, however fleeting they might be.)

And since Friedman is one of the world’s primo thought leaders, and since his influence largely depends on his access to what the captains of finance and industry think (or want us to think), you can be sure that the Golden Straitjacket analysis – and all its implications for trade policy and economic globalization writ large – was one that was adopted and actively propagated by the world’s political and business establishment.

But the outcries prompted by the Trump NAFTA and tax reform proposals point unmistakably to conclusions that hardly flatter the Straitjacket theory, either in its actual or publicly conveyed forms. The one that I believe conforms most closely to how the global economy actually works? As I’ve been documenting since my book The Race to the Bottom came out in 2000, contra Friedman – and the bipartisan globalist American leaders who drank and sold this kool-aid – governments all over the world, big and small, have long been attracting investment with a wide array of interventionist policies that combine mixtures of trade barriers sticks and subsidy carrots. That is, the Golden Straitjacket theory in all its forms was self-serving corporate garbage – a particularly cynical version of “Heads, I win. Tails, you lose.”

Of course, economies that attracted investment needed to be relatively well governed (at least for the multinationals’ purposes) and politically stable. But as long as the main effect of these national investment conditions was consistent with corporate cost-cutting, and resulting greater profits, the multinationals didn’t publicly protest being jerked around. Indeed, they complied with foreign governments’ dictates pretty meekly.

The only difference, then, that could be made by the Trump NAFTA and Republican tax proposals? The multinationals face being jerked around in ways that will likely narrow their profits. And since they naturally view that as anathema, they’re suddenly claiming that they can’t easily hopscotch across national boundaries very quickly after all.

That’s not to say that the companies are wrong in noting that supply chains will be shaken up if the Trump NAFTA and Republican tax proposals become policy. But remember – the multinationals have for decades been highly successful at moving these chains out of countries like the United States. Surely they’ll manage to move them back if need be just as successfully. And those that can’t meet this challenge? Anyone truly believing in capitalism and its virtues will be confident that others will emerge to fill the vacuum and service a near $20 trillion American market (in pre-inflation terms). Unless those “creative destruction” and entrepreneurship things are just fakeonomics, too?

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Being Tom Friedman Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry About China Trade

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China, Mainstream Media, protectionism, pundits, The New York Times, Thomas Friedman, Trade, World Trade Organization, WTO, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Uber-pundit Thomas Friedman’s New York Times column this week about China demonstrated both that “better late than never” may not always be true, and that there’s precious little accountability in the Mainstream Media. Too bad he performed both vital tasks completely unwittingly?

As he traveled through China recently, Friedman told us, his conviction grew that, as President Trump has been charging, “China is not playing fair on trade and has grown in some areas at the expense of U.S. and European workers….” Moreover, he adds, this China challenge “needs to be addressed — now.”

Continued Friedman: “The core problem, U.S. and European business leaders based in China explained, is that when the U.S. allowed China to join the World Trade Organization in 2001 and gain much less restricted access to our markets, we gave China the right to keep protecting parts of its market — because it was a ‘developing economy.’ The assumption was that as China reformed and become more of our equal, its trade barriers and government aid to Chinese companies would melt away.

“They did not.”

And Friedman did a pretty good job of summarizing what RealityChek regulars and so many others have known for years – that China’s mercantilism became considerably worse.

The author ended his piece with a (sort of) ringing call for action: “China needs to know that some people who disagree with everything else Trump stands for — and who value a strong U.S.-China relationship — might just support Trump’s idea for a border-adjustment tax on imports to level the playing field.”

But Friedman also included this kicker: According to someone he called “the smartest person I know inside China on trade (who will have to go nameless),” such actions “if anything… may be too late.”

As the author’s reaction – “Ouch!” – suggests, there’s a distinct possibility that his source is right about the consequences of waiting sixteen years to grapple seriously with China’s predatory practices.

But here’s what Friedman didn’t tell you: One of the folks who pushed vigorously for the boneheaded American WTO decision was none other than Thomas Friedman! As he wrote in 2000, opponents of China’s admission, like U.S. labor unions, were “head-in-the-sand” protectionists. Nor did Friedman seem to think much of fears that “China’s entry into the WTO will make it a more formidable geopolitical rival to the United States.”

Instead, he confidently wrote that “to say that [admission] will hurt the cause of democratization in China or that it won’t help create more islands from which Chinese democrats can operate and more tools by which they can communicate, is to speak utter nonsense.”

Interestingly, by 2011, Friedman seemed to be having important second thoughts about China’s reformist intentions. But he still doggedly opposed meaningful actions to neutralize Beijing’s currency manipulation, for example, with tariffs.

Since no one likes to admit mistakes – especially whoppers – I can certainly understand Friedman’s failure to report his enthusiasm for a China trade strategy he now recognizes as a titanic failure. Much less clear is why so much of the rest of the Mainstream Media – and especially news talk shows who view him as a globalization oracle – keep giving him a pass.

Im-Politic: Beyond Parody with Uber-Pundit Thomas Friedman

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China, corruption, foreign students, higher education, Im-Politic, Immigration, Muslims, Reuters, tech workers, The New York Times, Thomas Friedman, travel ban, Trump

Last March, I took one look at a column by Thomas Friedman on then-presidential candidate Donald Trump’s trade policies and concluded that the multiple New York Times Pulitzer winner must have been hacked. Any other interpretation would have meant that Friedman was either stunningly ignorant about these subjects or (at best) willfully ignorant.

A year later, it’s painfully obvious that either some impostor is still publishing pieces with The Times, or that Friedman is still reality-challenged. His March 29 offering contains the same kinds of trade fakeonomics and crackpot geopolitics as that piece I spotlighted last March. But even worse this time around are some out-and-out howlers about major implications of the Trump administration’s travel ban proposals.

According to Friedman, President Trump wants to “make it harder for people to immigrate to America, particularly Muslims. This…signals the smartest math and science students in the world to start their start-ups overseas and not in America. “

As evidence, Friedman writes that “NBC News reported last week that applications from foreign students, notably from China, India and the Middle East, ‘are down this year at nearly 40 percent of schools that answered a recent survey by the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.’”

In other words, could any Trump policy be more catastrophically dumb, especially over the long-term? The trouble is, when you look at these matters in any depth whatever, you realize how deeply silly these claims and fears are. In the first place, the idea that foreign students on U.S. college campuses are all or mainly or even disproportionately academic superstars is completely fallacious. And nowhere is it more fallacious than in the case of Chinese students.

For anyone knowing anything about contemporary China knows that it’s become one of the world’s leading plutocracies. The wealthy generally either make (or keep or lose) their fortunes depending on their connections with or via help from the Chinese government, or are comprised of political leaders themselves who have exploited their power and contacts to become millionaires many times over. Given the astronomical costs of American higher education (especially by the standards of even the typical Chinese urban – meaning relatively well-off – family), it could not be clearer that the main distinguishing characteristic of Chinese students on U.S. campuses is family money, not brains.

The money angle is further strengthened by admissions practices of so many American colleges and universities. After all, even well-endowed schools prize foreign students to a great extent because they’re wealthy enough to pay “full freight.” That is, they don’t need financial aid. Indeed, they’re profit centers. In fact, as I reported last October, a Reuters investigation found out that many Chinese students have gained access to American colleges and universities through payments to these institutions that can only be called corruption. In other words, their parents have bought their way in. Would most of this bribery be necessary if the kids were such geniuses?

Moreover, if you think that the money issue is confined to China, think again. For an expensive American college education is also far beyond the reach of most families in most of the rest of the world, too – especially the developing world.

As for the world’s math and science whizzes, especially from the Muslim world, avoiding the United States and choosing other regions and countries to open up businesses, ask yourself the simple question, “Like where?” Economically speaking, America’s growth prospects continue looking brighter – as they have for most of the current global recovery – than those of other major economies. The United States also offers among the world’s best levels of intellectual property protection.

And as for tech whizzes from the Muslim world, does Friedman really think they’re going to be increasingly welcome in, say, Europe, given its understandable anxieties about Islamic extremism and global terrorism? Japan and South Korea, it’s widely known, aren’t welcoming to any immigrants. And the idea that China, which has long battled Muslim separatists in its western regions, is going to open its doors wider just doesn’t pass the laugh test.

Canada and Australia are unmistakably examples of national economies that are both successful and immigration- (and refugee-) friendly. But I’ll take my chances on America retaining its competitive edge over them for many decades to come.

These kinds of gargantuan goofs and omissions would be bad enough coming from a run-of-the-mill journalist or even pundits. Coming from Friedman, they are nothing less than appalling. For his almost uniquely lofty status stems for the most part from his (supposedly) unique knowledge of how the world works in the most fundamental senses. Indeed, he’s especially well known for writing books purporting to know what the world’s becoming in the same fundamental senses. Columns like his latest indicate that Friedman at best should spend more time learning about the present than predicting the future.

Guest Post: Cable News is Badly Missing the Big ISIS Picture, by B.J. Bethel

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Brussels attacks, cable news, Fareed Zakaria, Guest Post, Iraq, IS, ISIS, media, Middle East, Paris attacks, pundits, San Bernardino, Syria, terrorism, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Thomas Friedman

Although campaign junkies wouldn’t know it, one of the biggest news developments of the day is being badly mis-reported by the cable news networks they followed obsessively: The Islamic State in the Levant (ISIL – also commonly known as ISIS or just IS) is losing in the Levant – namely, in Syria and in Iraq.

With presidential candidates wanting to forgo the Geneva Convention, carpet bomb civilians and generally try to out-tough each other in debate after debate, you’d think IS is conquering the world like Alexander the Great, or running a blitzkrieg through central Europe. But producers and executives trying to capture eight-second attention spans seem incapable of getting the story right. In fact, the only reliable American reporting on IS’ remarkably fast fade is coming from major U.S. newspapers.

Just a year and a half ago, IS was indeed frighteningly on the rise. It controlled an area the size of Great Britain, reaching from Syria into Iraq to Tikrit. The group captured the second-largest city in Iraq – Mosul – after the Iraqi military refused to fight. It created a new arena for terror on social media, posting videos of brutal executions. Mass executions of Christians in Libya, captured on video, quickly followed, and shocked those who failed to realize the reach of the group or its brutality.

Adding to the sense of alarm: evidence that IS was rewriting the terrorism rule book Western officials thought they’d figured out. Indeed, last year The New York Review of Books published a history of IS by “Anonymous” – identified as a high-ranking official in a Western government. The main theme: The group defied convention. Nearly every move it made was wrong according to the existing framework of success for terror groups and the West had no explanation for its existence, let alone its success and how to stop it.

Circumstances are different now. The Islamic State has lost most of its major territory in Iraq. An Iraqi military division – trained by the U.S – ran IS out of the city of Tikrit in a day and a half. Its last major stronghold outside of rural territory is Mosul, but local news service Rudaw has reported that Sunni militia, the Kurdish and Iraqi presidents, and U.S. envoy Brett McGurk are planning to retake Mosul, in what is expected to be one of the bloodiest battles in the region’s history of the region. Already, the U.S. military has been operating within 75 miles of Mosul. It seems the bully has finally taken a punch to the face.

Yet when the IS issue is discussed on television – whether by pundits, politicians or candidates – it’s within the framework of two years ago, when the group was flooding Iraq. This alarmism seems to be justified by the group’s dramatically stepped up attacks outside the Middle East – in Paris, Brussels, and San Bernardino, California. But paradoxically, IS’ strikes outside its home region reflect its worsening predicament in Iraq and Syria, not its strength, and cable’s failure to present this context shows the costs of coverage lacking context or even analysis with minimal depth.

The contrast with the major dailies is especially revealing. Take The Wall Street Journal’s coverage of the battle in the Levant. When the Free Syrian Army took Palmyra last week, the Journal had the story a day or two later. The New York Times, and Fareed Zakaria’s Sunday morning GPS CNN show are also feature reporting with detail and solid judgment.

Why has national TV news been portraying the Islamic State with all the sloppiness of local TV news discussing the latest school board meeting? In all likelihood, because reporting complexity would make the standard four-panelist, five-minute pundit segments much difficult for audiences to follow. How could you keep typical viewers from flipping the dial after years of feeding them little but the latest cheap shot or salvo aimed at a rival political operative?

Debates could suffer, too. Since the audiences generally haven’t been informed about the current facts on the ground, on-target questions would be confusing. And the candidates themselves, as well as ratings-starved networks, would lose valuable opportunities to make those showy, attention-grabbing, tough-sounding “crank up the Enola Gay” quotes that end up on Vines and Facebook.

What exactly should the cable networks in particularly be covering? In particular, they need to do a much better job understanding and explaining IS’ attraction to its fighters and supporters.

During the group’s heyday a year ago, IS was indeed recruiting in droves. Now it’s failing to find new followers as it takes major losses and discovers fighting is a bit tougher when you aren’t rolling into cities unimpeded.

Thomas Friedman of The New York Times put it best – if you are a 20-year-old man in Syria or Iraq, don’t have a wife or job; IS can provide those. But circumstances have changed. IS is facing actual opposition, meaning there’s a good chance of dying from a bullet wound or a gravity bomb. IS, moreover, was paying its fighters with oil revenues, but these started drying up substantially right after its rigs were bombed by allied airstrikes.

In addition, one major reason for IS’ success despite its brutality and other convention-defying tactics has been its religious message. That is, IS is as much an apocalyptic cult as much as a radical Islamist terror group. It cites a belief that a confrontation with the West in Syria would bring about the end of the world. This is why the group uses social media as a means to keep itself in the news and to try to drive the U.S. into a conflict in Iraq: a final round with the West on Islam’s home soil would lend credibility to its vision of the end times and ostensibly supercharge recruiting.

But today, the group is engaged in heavy combat, its organization and rank and file both taking heavy losses. But the Western military role in Middle East combat has been relatively light – especially on the ground. So those end-of-the-world predictions are looking ever dicier.

In addition, IS has been losing much of the ground it had gained in Syria as well as in Iraq. The Kurds pushed IS across the Euphrates three weeks ago, forcing them into their home territory of Aleppo. Six months ago this accomplishment would have been unimaginable. Last week the Free Syrian Army defeated IS in Palmyra, the ancient Roman/Greco city.

Indeed, this brings us to another reason why IS’ recent loss of traction isn’t being covered: the unholy alliance arrayed against it. Hezbollah, Syrian dictator Bashir Al-Assad (who was Public Enemy No. 1 three years ago ahead of IS and all other radicals before him), the Free Syrian Army, the Russians, the Turks, the Kurds, (maybe some Al Qaeda elements), the Iranians – all these forces have had a part in pushing IS back and handing it defeat after defeat even as U.S.-aided Iraqi forces are beating the group in Iraq. How does one tell that tale in a 30-second news byte?

But complexity can never excuse shoddy reporting – in particular when it’s obscuring the most important IS-related development of all: IS isn’t attacking Brussels and Paris for its enjoyment but for survival, trying to move the battlefront, trying to take the focus from the Levant. Expect IS also to become more active in Libya, where it has created a new franchise, for lack of a better word. This isn’t the darkening shadow of conquest we’re seeing, however, but the desperate lashing out of a cornered animal.  

B.J. Bethel is an Ohio-based journalist who has covered politics, government, the environment, and sports for over a decade.

 

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Thomas Friedman’s Trump Trade Column Must be a Hack Job

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China, Donald Trump, environmental standards, labor standards, monitoring and enforcement, state-owned enterprises, The New York Times, Thomas Friedman, TPP, Trade, trade agreements, Trans-Pacific Partnership, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Thomas Friedman’s email account must have been hacked! Assuming the New York Times columnist doesn’t walk his offerings over to the paper’s editorial page office, what else could explain the appearance last night of an essay on trade under his byline so chock full of embarrassing mistakes and stale canards?

True, the column had a characteristically clever, Friedman-like premise: Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump shouldn’t be criticizing President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement because it contains exactly the kinds of tough-minded provisions that the champion deal-maker would insist on himself. Unfortunately, whoever really wrote the article revealed such ignorance that identity theft must have been committed.

To start, the impostor assumed that passages in a treaty’s text are remotely likely to change facts on the ground. But anyone as knowledgeable about trade policy as Friedman – who covered the beat for The Times in the 1990s – must realize that monitoring and enforcing rules on the books has never been a remotely strong suit of the U.S. government.

A big part of the reason is logistical.  As I’ve noted repeatedly, manufacturing complexes even in smallish developing countries like TPP signatory Vietnam are so vast that making provisions like new labor rights and environmental protections actually stick is impossible even for a superpower. Indeed, Washington struggles even to enforce such rules in the United States.

Another big reason has to do with the secretive nature of Asian governments like those in Vietnam and other TPP signatories such as Japan and Malaysia. Although the Pacific Rim trade pact does seek to curb the ways that these bureaucracies distort trade flows, anyone as familiar with the region as Friedman surely realizes that these regimes put few of their biggest decisions in writing, and make even fewer of them public. So as has long been the case, American officials will be hard-pressed even to identify violations of the new TPP provisions, let alone combat them effectively.

It’s also hard to imagine that the real Friedman would simply parrot the Obama administration talking point that TPP will greatly benefit Americans by eliminating tariffs in 18,000 product categories. How could he not have seen the documentation provided by Public Citizen (and refuted by exactly no one) that the United States doesn’t even sell overseas more than half of these products, and that its exports in most of the rest are miniscule?

And it’s positively inconceivable that the genuine Thomas Friedman would have claimed that “if we walk away from the TPP all our friends in the Pacific will just sign up for China’s R.C.E.P., or Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which will set trade rules in Asia….” He obviously would have known that six of the ten other TPP countries are clearly hedging their bets by signing on to the Chinese initiative, too. These including the biggest by far (Japan and Australia), along with Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, Vietnam.

In other words, the real Thomas Friedman would never have written that a negotiator as good as Donald Trump would have okayed an agreement with this many gaping loopholes and other weaknesses. Let’s hope that the hacker(s) are caught before Friedman’s reputation takes on more water!

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: A Worrisome Obama Interview on Iran

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allies, arms control, China, Cold War, INF treaty, inspections, Iran, Iran deal, New York Times, nuclear proliferation, nuclear weapons, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Richard Nixon, Robert Gates, Ronald Reagan, sanctions, Soviet Union, Thomas Friedman, verification

On Day Two of what we might call the Iran Nuclear Deal Era, I find myself wondering whether the more President Obama speaks out on the agreement, the weaker public support will get. Based on his new interview with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, this at least certainly should be the case.

To be clear, I continue to believe there could be a respectable case for Congress approving the agreement. It depends largely on technical questions about whether the monitoring and verification provisions really are crafted well enough to at least postpone Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon. I have strong doubts for political reasons, as I’ve explained, but hesitate at this point to decide definitively. These are matters that should be illuminated by serious evaluation process by lawmakers. Yet the Friedman interview casts further doubt on Mr. Obama’s strategic and political judgment, which House and Senate members need to consider as well.

Arguably the loopiest claim Mr. Obama made in the interview came in response to Friedman’s question, “Why should the Iranians be afraid” of “serious U.S. military retaliation if [they cheat]?” In fact, the question itself was kind of loopy, since the most immediate question raised by the prospect of Iranian violations is whether sanctions really are certain to be “snapped back” on. Even so, I was startled to read Mr. Obama answer, “Because we could knock out their military in speed and dispatch if we chose to, and I think they have seen my willingness to take military action where I thought it was important for U.S. interests.”

Leave aside any doubts over the president’s trigger finger. Does he really believe that the United States, either alone or even together with allies, could reduce Iran to a military pygmy? If so, then why doesn’t he have similar confidence about destroying Iran’s nuclear complex? What’s known of it is located in many fewer locations than Tehran’s military deployments, and without any meaningful Iranian defenses, America would face a much easier challenge monitoring and, if need be, acting against any other facilities. Moreover, these undeclared sites would pose much less of a proliferation danger in the absence of the declared sites.

Just as important: Could this possibly be the Plan B I called for yesterday? At least for now, I sure hope not, especially given warnings against this course of action from a wide range of military experts in the United States, Israel, and abroad, including Mr. Obama’s own former Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Mr. Obama’s discussion of sanctions, moreover, seems to bear out my concerns that international support for keeping Iran non-nuclear has always been paper-thin, and that as a result, talk of automatic or even highly likely snap back is nonsense. On the one hand, the president told Friedman that the current sanctions have “crippled the Iranian economy and ultimately brought them to the table.” He attributed their effectiveness to widespread global agreement that “it would be a great danger to the region, to our allies, to the world, if Iran possessed a nuclear weapon.”

On the other hand, however, Mr. Obama emphatically insisted that “in the absence of a deal, our ability to sustain these sanctions was not in the cards,” mainly because so many other countries had paid so much greater an economic price that America. He continued:

“if they saw us walking away from what technical experts believe is a legitimate mechanism to ensure that Iran does not have a nuclear weapon — if they saw that our diplomatic efforts were not sincere, or were trying to encompass not just the nuclear program, but every policy disagreement that we might have with Iran, then frankly, those sanctions would start falling apart very rapidly.”

But as I emphasized yesterday, countries that evidently have made their economic pain so clear to Mr. Obama can’t possibly view a nuclear weapons-free Iran as their top priority, and can’t be relied on to implement threats of snap back – unless an Iranian violation is genuinely obvious and egregious. In fact, the further into the deal’s time frame we proceed, the less reliable the allies will become – since they’ll have ever more Iran-related business to lose.

Finally, for now, it’s disturbing to see Mr. Obama compare his Iran breakthrough with (using Friedman’s words) “the same strategic logic that Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan used to approach the Soviet Union and China.” But as I noted yesterday, America’s China policy looks ever more like an historic failure. Beijing has become increasingly powerful and belligerent, and the leadership’s hold on power has remained strong because the trade profits and technology it’s secured (largely) from the United States have enabled it to foster prosperity as well as build up its military.

If anything, the Reagan-Soviet analogy is further off base. The former president signed a treaty on intermediate range nuclear weapons (INF) with Mikhail Gorbachev, and agreed to resume talks with Moscow on longer range, strategic arms. But before the INF deal was signed, he deployed American missiles in Europe to offset previous Soviet installations, and more broadly launched a huge military (including nuclear) buildup that played a big role in persuading Soviet leaders that the vastly superior U.S. economy could race theirs into the ground. The president also worked overtime to keep curbs on western dealings with the Soviet economy – often over heated allied objections. And in an interesting coda, the Obama administration recently has accused Russia of violating the INF accord.

It’s still of course possible that Mr. Obama has produced an Iran deal that protects American national security better than any realistic alternative. But if he has, the Friedman interview strongly suggests that the adage “Nonsense in, nonsense out” (to put it politely) will never be the same.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Follow the Money, Not the Pundits, to Understand the Chinese Tech Challenge

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Ali Baba, CFIUS, China, cyber-security, forced technology transfer, foreign direct investment, IBM, innovation, Intel, Qualcomm, technology, Thomas Friedman, Xi JInPing, Xiaomi, Yahoo, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Few stereotypes are as hardy (and seductive, at least for Americans) as that of copycat Asians who come from cultures incapable of fostering creativity and innovation – at least not on the scale for which the USA is known. And few are as as misleading. If you’re skeptical of either proposition, just consider Thomas Friedman’s column today in The New York Times about China’s economic and technological future, and a spate of news reports about the activities of U.S. and Chinese technology companies themselves.

In Friedman’s words, there’s a major conflict between Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s push to move his economy from labor-intensive manufacturing to “more knowledge-intensive work” and his determination to censor the internet as well as university research. “Alas, crackdowns don’t tend to produce start-ups,” Friedman concludes.

It’s hard to argue with the logic, but oft times the world thumbs its nose at sensibileness – or at least as it’s defined by particular peoples. And however Americans cherish the notion that the political freedoms and inventiveness go hand in hand, and vice versa, lots of U.S. tech firms don’t seem to agree.

Cosmically, today also saw the appearance of a Wall Street Journal piece describing how Some of Silicon Valley’s largest companies have deepened their China partnerships in the past year.” The article mentions Intel and IBM, and could have added Qualcomm as well. Many of these deals and investments are simply responses to China’s longstanding policy of forcing foreign companies to transfer technology to Chinese partners in exchange for access to the potentially enormous Chinese market.

Lately, moreover, Beijing has added two big new wrinkles. First, its professions to fear spyware insertions in technology imports and high-profile decisions to curb purchases from U.S. firms in particular have given these companies major incentives to team up with Chinese entities. These are easier for the Chinese government to control – that is, when it doesn’t own them outright or indirectly. Second, China has begun to accuse foreign companies in numerous industries of violating Chinese laws in areas like anti-trust and bribery, and handed out some stiff fines. Non-Chinese firms have gotten the message that carrying out Beijing’s bidding in areas like tech transfer is a great way to stay on the Chinese authorities’ good side.

Nonetheless, it’s also clear that China has developed some technology winners – like Xiaomi, the up-and-coming smartphone producer that’s received Qualcomm funding ever since it held its first financing round. And let’s not forget the Yahoo stake in Chinese e-tailer Ali Baba – which may be the most valuable assets it owns.

Also ignored by Friedman is how, thanks to the literally trillions of dollars in trade profits it’s made with the United States and the rest of the world, China can now buy outright much of the advanced knowhow it needs – and has made acquiring U.S. companies a priority. Chinese takeovers with national security implications can be blocked or quietly deterred by an inter-agency American screening panel, but this Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. has more often acted like a rubber stamp than like a guardian.  

So the choice is pretty clear: When trying to understand innovation and economics in China, you can listen to the pundits, or you can follow the money. Hardly a close call if you ask me.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Another Poorly Thought Out Obama Doctrine

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9-11, Ali Khamenei, Carter Doctrine, Congress, Cuba, F. Scott Fitzgerald, foreign policy, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Iran, Iran deal, Jimmy Carter, New York Times, nucler weapons, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Persian Gulf, preemption, Putin, Russia, sanctions, stupid stuff, Thomas Friedman

Well, it seems that the previous Obama foreign policy doctrine sure didn’t last long. Starting last summer, the president’s diplomatic thinking made waves when a series of Mainstream Media reports, plus his own former Secretary of State, all seemed to agree that Mr. Obama’s strategic lodestar was “Don’t do stupid stuff” overseas. (You can read my critique here.) This week, however, the president appeared to unveil a strikingly new approach, which could be summarized as “Take Big Risks.” In addition, in an interview with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, Mr. Obama displayed other signs of greater foreign policy ambition, along with some incoherence, that didn’t attract nearly enough attention.

Friedman writes that the president’s own description of a new “Obama Doctrine”

“emerged when I asked if there was a common denominator to his decisions to break free from longstanding United States policies isolating Burma, Cuba and now Iran. Obama said his view was that ‘engagement,’ combined with meeting core strategic needs, could serve American interests vis-à-vis these three countries far better than endless sanctions and isolation. He added that America, with its overwhelming power, needs to have the self-confidence to take some calculated risks to open important new possibilities — like trying to forge a diplomatic deal with Iran that, while permitting it to keep some of its nuclear infrastructure, forestalls its ability to build a nuclear bomb for at least a decade, if not longer.”

This view, however, lumps together some risk-reward ratios that don’t seem to belong in the same category. It makes perfect sense to argue, as per the president, that

“You take a country like Cuba. For us to test the possibility that engagement leads to a better outcome for the Cuban people, there aren’t that many risks for us. It’s a tiny little country. It’s not one that threatens our core security interests, and so [there’s no reason not] to test the proposition. And if it turns out that it doesn’t lead to better outcomes, we can adjust our policies.”

But to contend that “The same is true with respect to Iran” is worrisome. Mr. Obama allowed that Iran is

“a larger country, a dangerous country, one that has engaged in activities that resulted in the death of U.S. citizens, but the truth of the matter is: Iran’s defense budget is $30 billion. Our defense budget is closer to $600 billion. Iran understands that they cannot fight us. … You asked about an Obama doctrine. The doctrine is: We will engage, but we preserve all our capabilities.”

This assessment, however, is coming from a president avowedly supremely aware of the difficulties America ran into in the last decade fighting in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq in post-9-11 Afghanistan. As with Vietnam decades before, these interventions show that crude indicators of military strength like budget levels can be dangerously misleading – all the more so when the adversary is halfway around the world, and convinced that it’s fighting for survival or for a fanatical cause. In addition, of course, the consequences of getting Cuba or Myanmar wrong are indeed negligible. Even if Washington avoids a new war, the consequences of getting Iran wrong could be catastrophic, not least because it could result in the acquisition of nuclear weapons by a government with expansionist aims in a region still crucial to the world’s energy supplies.

An Obama miscalculation on Iran becomes even scarier upon realizing that the president seems to have greatly expanded America’s defense commitments in the Persian Gulf. In 1980, President Carter’s doctrine declared that the United States would defend Gulf states from aggressors from outside the region – meaning the Soviet Union. In the aftermath of 9-11, George W. Bush’s administration signaled a determination to respond with force preemptively – before being attacked – to eliminate the threat of weapons-of-mass-destruction use by rogue states. In 200x, the president turned words into deeds with the invasion of Iraq.

Now, Mr. Obama states that he’s willing “to make the kinds of commitments that would give everybody in the neighborhood, including Iran, a clarity that if Israel were to be attacked by any state, that we would stand by them.”  

That could be a perfectly legitimate decision to make. But as a major ramp up of U.S. foreign defense obligations, it needs a thorough examination by Congress and the public. Intensive debate is all the more important given the squeeze on America’s defense budget, and given the crucial lesson that the president should have learned from dealing with Vladimir Putin: The line between the internal and external threats faced by states are anything but clear-cut. And Iran has been at least as active as Russia in using various non-state proxy groups to advance its interests.

Finally, the president’s views of what’s motivating Iran remain confusing.  On the one hand, Mr. Obama repeated his conviction that “that the sanctions regime that we put together was weakening Iran over the long term,” stated that the country’s supreme leader agreed; and claimed that Ayatollah ali Khamenei believed that “if in fact he wanted to see Iran re-enter the community of nations, then there were going to have to be changes.” On the other hand, he described Iran as “a country that withstood an eight-year war and a million people dead, they’ve shown themselves willing, I think, to endure hardship when they considered a point of national pride or, in some cases, national survival.”

In other words, President Obama views Iran both as a country that would not allow stronger sanctions to “stop its nuclear program” (as he said in announcing the deal last week), and as one that was so anxious for sanctions relief that the prospect led to talks that have rendered it toothless (by his account) for many years.

It’s true that F. Scott Fitzgerald once famously wrote that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” At the same time, he made this point in an essay titled “The Crack-Up.”

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: What Could Thomas Friedman Possibly Mean?

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disorder, global order, grand strategy, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Thomas Friedman

A question that should be asked more often by consumers of journalism and policy writing is “What could that possibly mean?” It will help them make the vital distinction between articles and studies and books that are actually worth reading because their arguments and proposals are reasonably tethered to reality, and those that are simply blather. (Of course, policy writers should follow this advice, too, but if they can’t make this distinction without my prompting, they’re probably hopeless to begin with.)

For a good example of writing (and thinking) that flunks the “What can that possibly mean?” test, check out New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s latest, which offers some thoughts on how the United States can deal successfully with the shocking disorder into which much of the world seems to be descending.

It’s a vitally important subject, and I don’t fault Friedman, a multiple Pulitzer Prize winner, for failing to present a detailed strategic blueprint given his format’s tight space constraints. But his readers surely have a right to expect more than a warmed over version of “Kumbaya’s” lyrics.

In terms that can plausibly be conceivable to policymakers for the foreseeable future, what could Friedman possibly mean by urging U.S. foreign policy to do more than “hedge risk and preserve a failing status quo”? What could he possibly mean when he advises American leaders “to be builders with enough foresight to shape a sustainable international order”? What are the specific, concrete measures that could achieve those goals?

What could Friedman possibly mean when he recommends supporting “regional leaders committed to the same”? Does he suppose that lots of them are sitting in their offices or tents or wherever waiting, Lana Turner-like, to be discovered by State Department talent scouts? What could he possibly mean by observing that foreign “leaders and their people are going to eventually have to embrace a new, more sustainable source of order that emerges from the bottom up and is built on shared power, values and trust”? What law of history mandates that happy outcome?

Friedman actually does present what he views as a model for such policies. But here’s the problem: It’s the U.S. approach to some of the Sunni lands in Iraq during America’s second war in that country. In Friedman’s words:

“The U.S. partnered with the Sunni Muslim tribal leaders who didn’t want puritanical Islam, or their daughters to be forced to marry fundamentalists, or to give up their whiskey. But we did not just arm them. We brokered an agreement of shared guns, shared power and shared values — about the future of Iraq — between those Sunni tribesmen and Iraq’s ruling Shiite prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.”

But of course, it takes two (at least) to stabilize, and clearly not enough Shiites bought in. Friedman appears to blame the United States for leaving too hastily – though he doesn’t explicitly make the accusation. But how long does he believe the U.S. forces could have stayed? And how long could they have kept Iraqi factions from each other’s throats?

In his summation, Friedman grants the objection that his prescription “sounds impossibly hard.” But the underlying problem is that he doesn’t even permit the debate to get that far. Because nothing in his column even remotely approaches a prescription or strategy. He simply presents readers with a string of gauzy platitudes – and leaves them to wonder “What could they possibly mean?”