Im-Politic: The Best Way Forward in Ukraine

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Afghanistan, Baltic states, Biden, China, Cold War, deterrence, Eastern Europe, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Poland, Russia, Taiwan, tripwire, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin

This is by no means what I want to happen – in fact, I find the prospect pretty troubling (as should you), But I can’t help but wonder if the current Ukraine crisis will end peacefully with the United States putting tripwire forces permanently in many of the relatively new Eastern European members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), in order to protect them against possible Russian designs, along with throwing Russian leader Vladimir Putin some kind of a rhetorical bone concerning his opposition to Ukraine joining NATO.

As known by RealityChek readers, tripwire forces are relatively small numbers of U.S. troops stationed on the soil of a vulnerable ally whose purpose is to deter attack by an aggressive, heavily armed neighbor. The idea isn’t that these U.S. forces will be enough to defeat the enemy – Washington has never been willing to pay for the manpower and weaponry to accomplish that goal. The idea is that the fear of killing American soldiers will greatly reduce the odds of an attack in the first place. That’s because it would greatly increase the pressure on a U.S. President to respond with the only measure that could prevent their imminent, total defeat (and possibly many more U.S. casualties) – using nuclear weapons.

I don’t like the idea because, especially today, it exposes the American homeland to the risk of nuclear attack (by far the worst national security disaster that could befall it, and likely the most destructive event in the nation’s history) in order to protect countries less than vital to the United States, and which could easily defend themselves if they weren’t such defense skinflints and free-riders. (South Korea has been a prime example, although, as I’ve written, its semiconductor manufacturing prowess has made it more important lately.)

At the same time, the tripwire strategy arguably played some role in keeping the Soviet military on its side of the Iron Curtain for decades during the Cold War, and it’s certainly conceivable that the kinds of deployments that President Biden seems to be thinking about could produce the same results in places like the Baltic states (which used to be Soviet republics) and Poland.

Not that this course of action would be risk-free. Sending lots of troops and heavy weapons like tanks would amount to stuffing lots more soldiers and lethal hardware into a relatively small area, and very close to major Russian military forces. As I’ve written, the odds of an accidental conflict would inevitably rise.

That’s why it would be much better for the United States to come to an agreement with Putin recognizing the need for limits on Western military deployments on Russia’s borders, and on future NATO expansion.

But Mr. Biden doesn’t seem interested in serious negotiations. Maybe that’s because he honestly believes that geography shouldn’t matter in world affairs and that countries should be free to make any security arrangements they like regardless of what powerful neighbors think. Maybe that’s because he’s afraid of further charges of weakness from domestic critics and voters in the wake of his botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. Maybe it’s both. But at this point the reasons for his position matter much less than his position itself..

Boosting the U.S. military footprint in Eastern Europe, especially in a steady, methodical way, would project an image of strength that he so desperately seeks now, and in theory enough to offset the effects of his decision (for now) not to use force to save Ukraine (which in my view will at the very least increase Moscow’s dominance of the country, either through a military occupation, attacks that enable Putin to peel off regions of Ukraine’s east, or a coup or other machinations that install a puppet government in Kyiv).

And although Moscow will huff and puff, the presence of Americans in places like the Baltics in particular are likely to keep the Russians out – and in ways that the presence of, say, Danes and Spaniards won’t.

Some big questions would remain. For example, what if Putin tried to destabilize the Baltics by stirring unrest among their sizable Russian populations? And will Germany, which is actually blocking the efforts of NATO countries to strengthen Ukraine’s armed forces apparently and in part for fear of antagonizing Russia further, be OK with using the American bases on its soil to help maintain U.S. forces stationed on NATO’s easternmost front lines?

I don’t have the answers here. But worrisome as the tripwire strategy is, unless Washington is ready for some significant give-and-take on Eastern Europe’s future, it’s much better than some of the alternatives I can imagine:

>like a Russian takeover of Ukraine without any offsetting steps that really could create big doubts about American reliability in places unmistakably vital to the U.S. future – especially global semiconductor manufacturing leader Taiwan – and tempt more aggression by China (mainly against Taiwan);

>like so many foreign weapons flooding into Ukraine that they could either trigger a Russian preemptive attack on their own, or give Kyiv enough confidence to mount the kind of full-scale resistance that following an invasion that would produce fierce enough fighting to spill over into neighboring countries. Alternatively, such a conflict could push President Biden into more active U.S. military involvement that might become particularly dangerous because of its very haste.

After his summit with Putin in Geneva, Siwtzerland last June, the President said “I think that the last thing he wants now is a Cold War.“ Unfortunately, largely because he’s painted himself into such a tight diplomatic corner, for now, that may be the best of a series of bad outcomes for Americans. And for Europe East and West, it’s certainly better than the other kind of conflict.

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Our So-Called Foreign Policy: An America Last Troop Agreement with South Korea

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alliances, allies, Biden, China, Cold War, deterrence, Donald Trump, Japan, North Korea, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, South Korea, Soviet Union, tripwire

The United States and South Korea have negotiated an agreement on sharing the cost of basing U.S. troops on the peninsula, and the outcome raises the question of why the Biden administration bothered to negotiate in the first place. For the agreement simply endorsed the offer made by the Koreans under the Trump administration. In fact, it clearly signaled to America’s other security allies that under Mr. Biden, the United States will revert to its pre-Trump policies of permitting them to skimp on outlays for their own defense, thereby needlessly exposing the American homeland to the risk of nuclear attack by the adversaries these alliances are supposed to resist.

Let’s begin by remembering why the link between these decades-old alliances and nuclear risk exist in the first place. As I’ve written repeatedly (and most comprehensively here), it resulted from an early-Cold War period American decision to give up on the hugely expensive idea of using U.S. conventional military forces to deter threats posed by the old Soviet Union, China, and North Korea, and rely instead on intimidating these foes by brandishing nuclear swords.

Non-nuclear U.S. forces, however, still played a vital role in this strategy. Their purpose was serving as “tripwires.” It was the prospect of their being destroyed by their superior enemies that was deemed likely to spur U.S. Presidents to use the nukes to save them, and creating the prospect of escalation to full-scale, intercontinental nuclear exchanges that would prevent the initial aggression to begin with.

Of course, if such deterrence failed, and a full-scale nuclear war broke out, the U.S. homeland would probabl become a casualty. But in those days, the gambit wasn’t completely crazy. In the first place, the security of the allies being protected (mainly Western Europe and Japan) was arguably vital to America’s own security. In the second place, for most of the Cold War, the United States possessed either a nuclear monopoly over the potential adversaries, a meaningful edge, or parity. And even the latter was considered adequate to keep the nuclear retaliation threat credible. In the third place, during the early Cold War decades, the allies – all of which were devastated by World War II – simply couldn’t mount serious defenses of their own.

These days, though, the alliances situation has changed dramatically. Most of the allies can still be considered vital assets for the United States. And all of them are now wealthy enough to build militaries capable of self-defense. But they choose not to, preferring instead to rely on those American military tripwires to deter attack and use their national resources elsewhere, thereby ensuring the continuing nuclear threat to the United States.

Significantly, the major ally that always and still has the least significance to America’s safety and well-being has been South Korea. In addition, the ally-adversary wealth gap is clearly widest between South Korea and its economically impoverished, Stalinist northern neighbor. But because of Seoul’s defense free-riding, because North Korea now has built an impressive nuclear arsenal and is nearing the capability of reaching the continental United States with its missiles, and because not even the alliance-skeptical Trump administration elected to remove the tripwire and thus eliminate any reason for North Korea to threaten, much less actually strike, U.S. targets, the alliance-related nuclear danger to America remains and (given North Korea’s unpredictability, could well be greatest) where running this risk is least justifiable.

Not that the Trumpers ignored the situation completely. Before his administration began, the former President did reveal some awareness of alliance-related nuclear security problems – especially in Asia. And although this theme quickly vanished from the list of stated Trump alliance concerns, he did vigorously press all the major allies, including South Korea, to boost their military budgets and pay more of the costs of hosting U.S. forces. In fact, during his term, the former President continued his pre-inauguration threats to remove some of the American forces from South Korea in order to turn up the heat on Seoul. (He actually ordered a troop drawdown from Germany for the same reasons).

The allies – including South Korea – and their enthusiasts in the bipartisan globalist U.S. foreign policy establishment predictably cried “foul,” contending that Trump had turned American alliance policy into a base exercise in “transactionalism” and “shakedowns,” and none more loudly than candidate Joe Biden last year. In an October op-ed for a South Korean new agency he made clear his determination to return to pre-Trump coddling regardless of the nuclear risk to his own country.

“As President,” he promised, “I’ll stand with South Korea, strengthening our alliance to safeguard peace in East Asia and beyond, rather than extorting Seoul with reckless threats to remove our troops.”

And unfortunately for anyone who would put America’s security first, he’s been true to his word. The latest agreement specifying South Korea’s payment level for the 28,500 American troops stationed in harm’s way right up against the Demilitarized Zone that divides the peninsula had run out in 2019. Deadlocking the talks since then had been Trump’s insistience that Seoul roughly quintuple its last agreed-on figure of about $920 million annually to about $5 billion, and consent to renegotiating the amounts each year rather than every five years. (One news account reported that this demand didn’t come from Trump himself, and that the administration eventually decided to call for a 50 percent first-year hike.)

Biden’s solution? Secure a marginal increase from 13 percent to 13.9 percent in the last annual payments offer reportedly made by South Korea. Thereafter, Seoul will boost its yearly contributions at the same rate as it increases its defense budget – which of course by definition remains woefully inadequate, since despite some recent military spending progress clearly spurred by America First-fueled anxieties, it would still require South Korea to depend on American support. (Incidentally, different accounts of the exact terms have been reported here and here.)

The result? The South Koreans are happy that the Biden administration is dealing with them in “ mutually beneficial and rational manner” and not in “a transactional fashion.” A State Department spokesperson was tickled that the deal has kept the “Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment to reinvigorating and modernizing our democratic alliances around the word to advance our shared security and prosperity.” The Mainstream Media’s globalism cheerleaders are impressed that Mr Biden is farsightedly willing to “cut allies a break to build unity in competition against China and Russia.”

And Americans are still one temper tantrum by Kim Jong Un away from either sitting by and watching nearly 30,000 of their soldiers overrun in an invasion, or trying to save them from total destruction and South Korea from armed conquest with nuclear attacks that could bring a North Korean warhead down on a major American city…or two…or three.

P.S. All indications are that the Biden administration is going to stage a rerun with Japan – though as indicated above, this ally is at least more important than South Korea.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Why China Really is Like Nazi Germany

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Albert O. Hirschman, allies, Biden, China, dumping, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, intellectual property theft, Japan, multilateralism, NATO, Nazi Germany, nuclear umbrella, Robert D. Atkinson, sanctions, South Korea, tariffs, tech industry, technology extortion, Trade, tripwire, Trump, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Because Nazi references can be so irresponsibly inflammatory, and therefore have been so often abused, I haven’t yet compared the threat posed by China to the rest of the world to that posed by Nazi Germany. (In my view, these comparisons have been used even more recklessly lately in U.S. domestic politics, chiefly to describe former President Trump and his views and policies.) So even though the People’s Republic, its ambitions, and its burgeoning capabilities do scare the living daylights out of me (and should scare you), I was nonetheless pretty surprised to see precisely this comparison just made by Robert D. Atkinson.

Atkinson is the head of a technology-focused Washington, D.C. think tank who I’ve known since the early 1990s. I’ve admired some of its work and haven’t been so crazy about other examples of its output, but I’ve never, ever considered him a boat-rocker, much less a rhetorical bomb thrower. In fact, my criticisms of the numerous studies and articles issued by his Information Technology and Innovation Foundation stem from my view that they’re way too cautious when it comes to countering China’s wide range of predatory economic practices (which include predatory technology policy practices like the theft and extortion of intellectual property).

And I’ve attributed much of this caution to the Foundation’s donor base – which is dominated by the U.S. and in some cases foreign tech and manufacturing companies that have worked so hard to send so much production and employment, and (voluntarily) so much technology to China for decades. It’s true that many of these firms are now crying foul as Beijing in recent years has aimed to strengthen its own entities’ positions at the foreigners’ expense. Yet their stubborn opposition to the unilateral Trump tariffs and some key sanctions on the Chinese tech outfits that have been major customers made clear their vain hope that they could somehow have their China cake and eat it, too.

Yet here comes Atkinson in the Fall issue of The International Economy (a publication that’s as – proudly – establishment oriented as they come) with a piece titled “A Remarkable Resemblance” likening China’s international economic policies to those of “Germany for the first forty-five years of the twentieth century” – which of course include the twelve Nazi years (1933-1945).

As the author argues, Germany during these decades was:

“a ‘power trader’ that used trade as a key tool to gain commercial and military advantage over its adversaries. Likewise, China’s trade policy is guided neither by free trade nor protectionism, but by power trade, with remarkably similar strategy and tactics to those of 1940s Germany. Understanding how Germany manipulated the global trading system to degrade its adversaries’ capabilities, entrap nations as reluctant allies, and build up its own industries for commercial and military advantage, just as China is doing, can shed light and point the way for solutions to the China challenge.”

Atkinson reports that this description of German policies came from a 1945 book by the important economist Albert O. Hirschman, which concluded that “[I]t’s is possible to turn foreign trade into an instrument of power, of pressure, and even of conquest. The Nazis have done nothing but exploit the fullest possibilities inherent in foreign trade within the traditional framework of international economic relations.”

The author rightly observes that

“Hirschman’s key insight was that some countries— in this case Germany under three very different government regimes from 1900 to 1945—focus not on maximizing free trade or even on protecting their industries, but on changing the relative power of nations through trade to achieve global power. Germany’s policies and programs were designed not only to advance its own economic and military power, but to also degrade its adversaries’ economies, even if that imposed costs on their own economy relative to a free trade regime.”

Germany also consistently sought, as the author points out “to make it more difficult for its trading partners to dispense entirely with trade with Germany, thus creating dependency.” And if that’s not enough to convince you about the comparison with China today, Atkinson himself notes that the German policy recipe also included massive industrial espionage, and Hirschman identified a major element as the equally massive dumping (selling at prices way below production costs) of goods into foreign markets to destroy overseas competition.

Atkinson’s diagnosis of the problem is so spot-on that it makes his recommended solution especially disappointing. Kind of like President Biden, he believes that the best internationally oriented option by far (on top of more effective support for U.S. industry, which I strongly support) is forming a “NATO for trade” that would be

“governed by a council of participating [free trading] countries…if any member is threatened or attacked unjustly with trade measures that inflict economic harm, DATO [the “Democratically Allied Trade Organization] would quickly convene and consider whether to take joint action to defend the member nation.”

I’ve already pointed out that the consensus on standing against China economically among America’s allies is way too weak to enable such multilateral approaches to succeed. But as long as we’re talking in terms of NATO – the military alliance between the United States and much of first Western and now Eastern Europe – and the Cold War, let’s not forget two other big problems. First, NATO (and this also goes for America’s security ties with South Korea and Japan) was never so much an alliance as a protector-protectorate relationship. The vast bulk of the heavy lifting was always done by the United States.

This allied security dependence in turn has produced the second major obstacle to a DATO’s effectiveness. Because the United States coddled allied defense free-ridingcand opened its markets one-sidedly for so long, the allies’ protectorate status was substantially cost-free economically, and even came with trade rewards no other country could remotely offer. (In addition, as I’ve also written, the creation of an American nuclear umbrella combined with the stationining of U.S. “tripwire” forces on the NATO frontlines in Germany also greatly minimized the military risks of siding with Washington.)

Today, however, economic power between the United States and the allies is more evenly distributed, and the allies’ profitable trade with and investment in China has, as noted in my aforementioned writings, greatly increased the economic price they would pay for lining up against China.

Still, by comparing the China threat to the Nazi threat, Atkinson’s article significantly bolsters the case for the United States escalating its response to the “all of society” level – or at least intensifying it qualitatively. Let’s just hope, as the author writes, that this time around the United States fully awakens a lot faster.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Trumply Deranged Coverage of a Trump Security Policy Win

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alliances, allies, America First, burden sharing, deterrence, Financial Times, globalism, James White, Joe Biden, military spending, North Korea, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, South Korea, tripwire, Trump

I know that there’s lots more to say about last week’s outrageous Capitol Hill riot and its political and even broader fallout, but sometimes a news development comes along that’s so underappreciated and at the same time so poorly reported that I just couldn’t resist weighing in right away.

I’m talking about decisions being made in South Korea to become more militarily self-reliant, and the way they were reported in the Financial Times a week ago. The article, by Edward White, had it all as far as my Trump-y, America First-type worldview is concerned: an (apparently unwitting account) of signs of a clearly emerging potential triumph for this approach to U.S. foreign policy; a comparably stinging (and unwitting) rebuke of its globalist counterpart; a complete failure to mention the benefits for the United States (as opposed to the impact elsewhere) coupled with  attempts by globalist supposed experts focusinf singlemindedly on the downsides and ignoring the consequences for Americans; and just plain sloppy journalism.

As known by RealityChek regulars, the news that long-time military ally (or protectorate, depending on your point of view) South Korea is revving up its defense spending is an unalloyed good for Americans. For decades, Seoul’s skimpy military budgets, which remained modest despite the country’s phenomenal economic progress, required the United States to supply the conventional forces needed to defend it against a North Korean attack.

The large American troop contingent stationed right at the Demilitarized Zone, directly in the North Koreans’ invasion path, might have made sense when Washington had no reason to fear any conflict going nuclear, and indeed viewed its possession of these arms as a pillar of its strategy of protecting South Korea by deterring aggression (because North Korea had no nukes of its own that could hit the U.S. homeland in retalition). But since North Korea is at the least so close to possessing this capability, the American units have turned into a tripwire all too likely to expose Americans to these risks, thereby rendering the U.S. nuclear guarantee a prime example of policy masochism. (This post described the changing Korean peninsula and overall Asian security environment, and its implications for U.S. strategy, back in 2014.) 

As also known by RealityChek regulars, President Trump has displayed some awareness of this situation, and, as White has reported, has pressed the South Koreans to get their self-defense act together – though in his often typically incoherent way, focusing almost entirely during his term on securing more South Korean financing of the expenses of deploying the U.S. forces on the peninsula than on planning to withdraw, and thereby eliminate the nuclear risk to America that their presence creates.

But White’s article cites evidence that Seoul has interpreted Mr. Trump’s harangues about rip off-obsessed allies as a clear sign that the United States is no longer a reliable ally, and that South Korea needs to build the manpower and especially weaponry it will need if the United States flies the coop. Especially interesting is the apparent South Korean conviction that these preparations must be made even though alliance fetishizer Joe Biden will become President on January 20.

Clearly, nothing could be better for the United States, and just as clearly, Trumpian impatience – following decades of coddling free-riding by globalist American leaders – deserves most of the credit. Even if Biden has no intention of withdrawing the American troops and bolstering his own country’s security, at least one major argument against such a step would be eliminated if South Korea became self-reliant.

But none of this side of the equation will be found in the article. Instead, South Korea’s stated new strategy is depicted as an regrettably inevitable result of “Mr Trump’s treatment of long-term allies.” And of course, grave risks abound, including the chance that “The build-up could send unintended signals of aggression or weakness, inviting miscalculations or adventurism from countries including North Korea, China and Russia.”

Typically, however, these experts ignore the screamingly obvious: If the U.S. troops leave, any miscalculations or adventurism would be problems for South Korea and its neighbors, not for the United States.

As for the sloppy journalism, that comes in when White tries to show that South Korea has already been an impressive military spender:

“South Korea’s annual defence bill is already high compared with those of many countries of a similar size and wealth. Military spending as a percentage of government expenditure was 12.7 last year, according to Stockholm Peace Research Institute data, ahead of 9.2 per cent in the US and the UK’s 4.5 per cent.”

To which the only serious response is, “Seriously?” Because why should anyone except an apologist care how Seoul’s defense spending compares with similarly sized or wealthy countries, much less with the United States’? After all, almost none of these countries lives in what’s probably the world’s most dangerous neighborhood, with an utterly deranged, nuclear-armed regime right next door for starters? Given South Korea’s (great) wealth, and North Korea’s impoverishment, the only important gauge of the adequacy of Seoul’s military budget is whether it can meet South Korea’s needs. And obviously, there’s a long way to go in this respect.

Moreover, even anyone who puts any stock in the numbers mentioned by White needs to ask themselves why the emphasis is on percentages of government spending? What actually counts is percentage of gross domestic product (GDP, or the entire economy). Because it’s the share of total national resources devoted to defense that genuinely makes clear the priority it enjoys. And with 2.7 percent the figure for highly insecure South Korea, according to the latest available data, and 3.4 percent that for the highly secure US of A, the only accurate way to describe defense as a South Korean priority is “not real high.”

Don’t get me wrong: As a sovereign country, Seoul has every right to skimp on defense spending. It also has every right to try to make another country bear an outsized measure of cost and risk for this decision. But the equally sovereign United States has every right to refuse to keep playing Uncle Sucker, especially when North Korea’s nuclear weapons make the stakes so potentially catastrophic. America’s outgoing President understood this, however imperfectly. Anyone believing that America’s security (especially from nuclear attack) needs to come first for Americans should be hoping that the nation’s incoming President quickly gets on this wavelength.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Big Decisions Coming on Asia

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Asia, Asia-Pacific, Central America, China, containment, currency manipulation, deterrence, East Asia-Pacific, Japan, Mexico, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear deterrence, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, semiconductors, South Korea, Taiwan, tripwire, U.S. Army, Vietnam, Walker D. Mills, Western Europe

Whenever I think about what to blog about, I ask myself a question that I first heard one of my all-time writing idols answer many years ago when he faced similar decisions. The occasion came during a college writing seminar where the guest lecturer was none other than Norman Mailer.

The seminar probably took place sometime in 1974, and one of my fellow students asked Mailer why he hadn’t turned out anything about the Watergate scandal. I had been wondering this myself. After all, Mailer’s world renown by then stemmed both from his novels and from his forays into the “new journalism” that was emerging in that era, in which gifted writers tried to employ some key techniques from fiction (especially their keen insights into human nature and their considerable descriptive and narrative skills) to shed light on the events of the day. On top of turning out numerous important non-fiction works, Mailer had also run (unsuccessfully) for Mayor of New York City in 1969. So he was by no means shy about sounding off on headline subjects, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one of his fans anxious to hear about the Nixon-centric drama.

But his answer was disarmingly simple. He decided to give Watergate a pass because he couldn’t think of anything distinctive and important to say.

And that’s an (admittedly roundabout) way of explaining why today’s post won’t be about any aspect of President Trump’s contraction of the CCP Virus. At the very least, events are moving so quickly that it’s hard to know the score. Instead, I’m focusing on foreign policy, and in particular two major, under-reported developments in U.S.-Asia relations that are underscoring the return of Cold War-like challenges across the Pacific, but that should be teaching American policymakers very different lessons.

I’ve already dealt to some extent with the first here on RealityChek: The U.S.’ loss of global leadership in the manufacture of cutting-edge semiconductors to companies in South Korea and especially Taiwan. In a journal article scheduled for publication this week, I’ll be laying out the key the technical details and some of the main policy implications. But in brief it amplifies my argument that the location of the world’s most advanced producers of the vital building blocks of modern economies and militaries right at China’s doorstep means that the defense of Taiwan in particular has now become a vital U.S. national security interest that requires the kinds of military forces and strategies (including a threat to use nuclear weapons) employed to protect major treaty allies like Japan and Western Europe both during the Cold War decades and since.

After all, those Cold War commitments – which exposed the United States to the risk of Soviet and to a lesser extent Chinese nuclear attack – were reasonably justified by the belief that Japan and Western Europe were centers of industrial and technogical power and potential that could create decisive advantages for the communist powers if they gained control or access to their assets. The importance of advanced semiconductors today means that Taiwan now belongs in the same category.

As I detail in the upcoming article, Washington has rightly been building closer diplomatic and military ties to Taiwan in response (though I also argue that it’s ultimately far more important for the United States to restore its semiconductor leadership ASAP). But this fall, an article in an official journal of the U.S. Army argued for taking a net step that, however logical, would be nothing less than momentous – and comparably sobering. In the words of Marine Corps Captain Walker D. Mills,

“The United States needs to recognize that its conventional deterrence against [Chinese military] action to reunify Taiwan may not continue to hold without a change in force posture. Deterrence should always be prioritized over open conflict between peer or near-peer states because of the exorbitant cost of a war between them. If the United States wants to maintain credible conventional deterrence against a [Chinese military] attack on Taiwan, it needs to consider basing troops in Taiwan.”

To his credit, Mills goes on to make explicit that such troops would in part be performing the kind of “tripwire” function that similar units in South Korea serve – ensuring that aggression against an ally ensures the start of a wider war involving all of America’s formidable military capabilities. The benefit, as always, would be to prevent such aggression in the first place by threatening consequences the attacker would (presumably) find prohibitive.

Where Mills (like U.S. strategists for decades) should have been much more explicit was in explaining that because the threatened major conflict could easily entail nuclear weapons use, and since China now in particular, has ample capability to strike the U.S. homeland, the deployment of tripwire forces can result in the nuclear destruction of any number of American cities.

So this course of action would greatly increase at least theoretical dangers to all Americans. But what’s the alternative? Letting Beijing acquire knowhow that could eventually prove just as dangerous? As my upcoming article demonstrates, the blame for this agonizing dilemma belongs squarely on generations of U.S. policymakers, who watched blithely as this dimension of the nation’s technological predominance slipped away. And hopefully, as I just stated, this predominance can be recreated – and dangerous new U.S. commitments to Taiwan’s security won’t become permanent.

But that superiority won’t come back for years. Therefore, it seems to me that, as nuclear deterrence provided for Western Europe and Japan succeeded in creating the best of both possible worlds for the United States, this strategy could well work for protecting Taiwan for essentially the same reasons.

I’ll just insist on one proviso: At some point before it becomes a fait accompli, this decision should be run by the American people – as has never been the case.

Unfortunately, as I’ve also pointed out, Taiwan has become so important to the United States that even an America First-inclined U.S. President will have to look the other way at its longstanding trade protectionism and predation in order to maintain close ties – just as it winked at German, Japanese mercantilism in particular during the Cold War. But that kind of linkage needn’t apply to other countries in East Asia (and elsewhere in the world), who lack the kinds of assets Taiwan possesses, and in that vein, I hope the Trump administration (and a Biden presidency, if the former Vice President wins in November) won’t let strategic considerations prevent a thoroughgoing probe of Vietnam’s possible exchange rate manipulation and one other trade offense.

The former concern, of course, stems from the effects of countries’ sometime practice of keeping the value of their currencies artificially low. An under-valued currency just as artificially lowers the prices of a manipulator’s goods and services in markets all over the world vis-a-vis their U.S.-origin counterparts, and therefore makes the latter less competitive for reasons having nothing do with free markets.

The argument against the investigation (which I’ve so far seen only on Twitter, but by folks who are thoughtful and well-informed) is that in an economic conflict with China, the United States needs all the friends it can get. In addition, these critics point out, if tariffs are placed on Vietnamese goods, then companies thinking of leaving China because of the Trump levies on hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of Beijing’s exports will face greater difficulties exiting, since Vietnam is such a promising alternative for so many products.

What these arguments overlook, however, is that, as a neighbor of increasingly aggressive China, and a country that’s struggled for centuries to prevent Chinese domination, Vietnam has plenty of powerful reasons of its own to help with any anti-China efforts initiated by the United States So it’s highly likely that Vietnam will keep cooperating with American diplomacy and other policies regardless of what the United States does on the trade front.

Moreover, Vietnam lacks Taiwan-style leverage over and value to the United States because it’s not a world-class producer of anything. So there’s no need for Washington to grin and bear Vietnamese trade abuses that may be harming the U.S. domestic economy.

And finally, although it’s great that Vietnam has been a prime option for companies thinking of moving factories and jobs out of China, it would be even better for Americans if those companies seeking low-cost production sites moved to Mexico or Central America, since greater economic opportunity for those Western Hemisphere countries will be so helpful to the United States on the immigration and drugs fronts.

Mark Twain is reputed (possibly incorrectly) to have said that “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.” That is, it holds important lessons, but discovering them can be challenging, and both American security and prosperity are about to depend heavily on U.S. leaders getting them right.

Following Up: It’s Fish-or-Cut-Bait Time for the U.S. Alliance with South Korea

Tags

alliances, allies, America First, burden sharing, CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, deterrence, globalism, North Korea, nuclear war, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, South Korea, The National Interest, tripwire, Trump, Wuhan virus

Just last week, I posted about how U.S. grand strategy in East Asia is heavily reliant on dangerously unreliable allies. So what a pleasant surprise to yours truly that the very day afterwards, polling data was published making clear just how fitting my description is of South Korea – a longtime bulwark of the American military position in the region. Just as important, the findings also confirm both (1) that the longtime strategy – which has largely continued during the Trump years – could result in American troops finding out during combat that forces and facilities they were relying on for support aren’t available after all; and (2) that coddling this fecklessness risks needlessly entrapping the United States into a nuclear war.

Although almost completely uncovered in the American media, the U.S.-South Korea alliance has been nearing a crossroads for months, as President Trump has insisted that the Seoul government pay more of the costs of stationing American forces on South Korean soil, and the South Koreans have responding with a mixture of grudging concessions at negotiations over the subject, and outright indignation. And in a July 23 National Interest post, a team of scholars from Western Kentucky University showed that a majority of the South Korean public feels exactly the same way.

There’s no question that, as a fully sovereign, independent country, South Koreans and their government have every right to hold whatever opinion they wishes about its security relations with the United States. But of course, Americans and their government are entitled to the same views, and it would be entirely reasonable to regard South Korea’s opinions and policies as complete – and dangerous – outrages.

As the Western Kentucky researchers show compellingly, numerous polls, as well as a recent survey of their own, show that strong majorities of South Koreans want the U.S. military to remain in their country because they believe that these forces are crucial to their own country’s security. But they’re also decidedly reluctant to accommodate the U.S. requests to shoulder more of the defense burden.

From an American standpoint, these attitudes would be understandable if any combination of the following conditions still described South Korea – it’s a poor country that can’t afford to defend itself adequately, or it’s already spending on its down defense to the max, or it doesn’t face very serious security threats to begin with. These conditions might also warrant cutting the South Koreans some slack when it comes to their resentment of President Trump’s allegedly heavy-handed approach to the issue – which the polls show tend to increase their unwillingness to pay more of the costs of hosting U.S. forces. After all, no one likes being bullied.

Here’s the problem, though, from an American standpoint: None of these conditions hold. And none are close to holding. For as of last year, South Korea was the world’s twelfth biggest economy, with total output of about $1.63 trillion. The gross domestic product of highly secretive North Korea’s is estimated at about $20 billion. That’s 0.01 percent of the South’s total. (Here‘s a handy source for the data.)

South Korea’s military spending isn’t real impressive, either. Both in absolute terms and as a share of its economy, it’s gone up. But as of last year, it was still only 2.7 percent of its gross domestic product. By comparison, the United States spends 3.4 percent of its economy on the military. (For both figures, click on this link.)

It can still be argued –as the Western Kentucky researchers maintain – that the South Koreans are already being more than generous in funding the U.S. military presence, and that a change in Trump attitude would likely induce more cooperation. But their defense burden-sharing views – as has been the case with so many others – weirdly ignore how the most valid standard by far is not whether the South Koreans (or any other U.S. ally) are paying as much as the United States for their defense or slightly more or slightly less or whatever. The most valid standard is whether they’re paying as much as is needed (adjusted for their capabilities of course) to defend themselves on their own. And the reason could not be more obvious: For all the talk of “common defense,” it’s their security that’s most at risk, not the United States’. (See my contribution to this anthology – from 1990 – analyzing this largely off-base burden-sharing debate.) 

And nowhere is this difference starker than on the Korean peninsula – on which South Korea is right next door to a North Korean regime that is widely described as dangerously aggressive or utterly deranged. Yet whatever you think of North Korea, nothing could be clearer than that it poses a much greater danger to South Korea than to the United States.

This observation, of course, brings us to the most completely unacceptable feature of this situation for Americans: It’s precisely because South Korea is flagrantly free-riding in defense matters that tens of thousands of U.S. troops need to be stationed right at the Demilitarized Zone dividing the peninsula, and why nowadays (as opposed to the period during which North Korea had no nuclear capabilities) their presence could well result in the U.S. homeland being hit by a North Korean nuclear warhead.

That’s because, as I’ve repeatedly explained, the mission of these U.S. forces isn’t to contribute a successful conventional military defense of South Korea.  They’re too weak – even with the help of the South Koreans.  Instead, their mission is to serve as a nuclear war tripwire – to prevent (or in the parlance of strategists “deter”) a North Korean attack in the first place by creating the danger that a U.S. President will respond to their imminent destruction by turning the conflict nuclear.  But however important South Korea is, is it really worth the complete destruction of a major American city, or two, that would result from a successful North Korean retaliation?

That this question has been evaded continuously by the U.S. government ever since North Korea’s nuclear forces began nearing intercontinental capabilities is appalling enough. That it’s still being evaded by a President supposedly devoted to America First principles – and now that Americans have had months of experience with the upheaval caused by a virus that for all its dangers can’t directly destroy any of the country’s infrastructure and the rest of its physical plant – is nothing less than masochistic. Indeed, compared with these nuclear issues, America’s legitimate gripes about finances are wildly misplaced, unless they’re seeking to pressure Seoul to become militarily self-sufficient – which they aren’t.

There’s one consideration that could overrule all these objections: If President Trump concluded that South Korea’s security was a vital American interest, and therefore by definition worth putting America’s very survival on the line for. But revealingly, no such utterances of the kind have issued from the administration. And if they had, of course, then the United States would automatically lose all its leverage in the defense costs talks with South Korea, as Seoul could be confident that America would (as so memorably pledged in former President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 Inaugural Address) “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship” to keep it free – and, incidentally, prosperous.

And here’s the icing on this cake: The public opinion findings presented by the Western Kentucky authors suggest that South Koreans on the whole aren’t so completely terrified by the threat from the North as Americans suppose them to be. For example, the authors’ own survey found that only 70 percent agreed that they were “concerned about North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.” And the authors report that “South Koreans were only mildly concerned about North Korea using military force against them ….”

Does this sound like an ally that’s certain to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Americans if military tensions in its own neighborhood approached the boiling point? That would promptly increase the preparations needed for imminent conflict? Or one that would keep hemming and hawing until the shooting actually started – and even afterwards attaching more importance to showing good faith to the North in hopes of halting the conflict than in mounting the most effective defense possible, much less helping the United State seize the initiative when the opportunity came? Anyone who believes that staunch South Korean backing can simply be assumed in any of these circumstances simply hasn’t been paying attention, and would be backing a policy sure either to produce calamitous defeat, or to push Washington to use nuclear weapons as a Hail Mary – and risk North Korean retaliation in kind.  

Finally, to return to a point made earlier: South Korea is a sovereign, fully independent country that’s completely entitled to pursue its own policy course. And if it’s not worked up about a North Korea threat to respond enough to give a joint defense of its territory a reasonable chance of success, it’s not for Americans to complain. Instead, it’s for them to either put their collective shoulder to the wheel and commit fully to defend the South come what may – or take the hint, get out of Dodge ASAP, and make sure they don’t have to pay the consequences if South Korea is wrong.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Trump’s Potentially Disastrous Germany Troops Decision

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America First, Cold War, deterrence, free-riding, Germany, military spending, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, nuclear war, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Poland, The Wall Street Journal, tripwire, Trump

So where will President Trump send those U.S. troops he’ll be moving out of  Germany? That may sound like an odd question to post about, given the widespread anti-racism and police brutality protests in the United States, still deeply depressed activity across the national economy, some signs of a CCP Virus second wave, and of course the intensifying presidential election campaign.

But precisely because, as Americans hopefully are learning, crises can spring up seemingly out of nowhere, it’s a crucial subject to examine. For if President Trump comes up with the wrong answer – as is entirely possible based on what’s known so far – the stage could be set for a terrifying and completely needless nuclear showdown with Russia that could all too easily result in a nuclear attack on the U.S. homeland. And in a supreme irony, these dangers all stem from what’s been shaping up as one of the President’s sharpest and most dangerous departures from the America First principles on which he’s based much of his foreign policy.

But let’s begin at the beginning. As first reported last week in The Wall Street Journal, and pretty strongly confirmed last week, the President has decided to reduce the numbers of active duty American servicemen and women stationed permanently in Germany from 34,500 to 25,000, and cap this presence at that level.

If the troops would be heading further west on the European continent, or heading back home, that would be great news for Americans, as it would dramatically reduce nuclear war risk. As I’ve frequently written, for decades, (although in much greater numbers during the Cold War), U.S. forces have been deployed in Germany not to defend Germany militarily, but to function as a tripwire.

That is, American policymakers were under no illusion that these units would strong enough (even in tandem with the forces of U.S. allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization – NATO – like Germany) to beat back an attack from the conventional forces of the Soviet Union and its satellite allies. But Washington believed that the U.S. presence in West Germany – which bordered then-Communist East Germany) would deter a Soviet attack in the first place precisely because of its vulnerability. Specifically, the specter of American soldiers being  decimated would force an American President to try saving them with nuclear weapons. The resulting prospect of the conflict threatening to escalate to the all-out nuclear leve – which would destroy the Soviet Union, too –  would supposedly be enough to keep Moscow at bay.

As I’ve also written, this strategy arguably made sense during the Cold War, when its aim was keeping in the free world camp West Germany and Western Europe and all of its formidable economic power and therefore military potential. Today, however, it not only makes no sense from a U.S. standpoint. It has become positively deranged, as the likeliest targets of post-Soviet Russian aggression (and the arenas where the U.S. forces would likeliest be sent if the shooting starts) are not the longstanding NATO members of Western Europe. Instead, they’d be sent to the newer NATO members of Eastern Europe – most of which border Russia, but whose security was never viewed as a vital U.S. interest (that is, worth risking war over), even in the Cold War days.

Even less excusably, sizable American forces have remained in Germany and elsewhere in Western Europe in part because Germany and most of the other allies keep skimping so shamefully on their own militaries – even though most have hardly been short of resources.

No ally has been a more disgraceful military free-rider than uber-wealthy Germany, and the President has been right to complain about German and broader stinginess, and to threaten major consequences if the allies’ defense budgets aren’t significantly boosted. But as I’ve also explained, he’s focused on the wrong objective: securing a fairer deal for U.S. taxpayers.

Instead, all along, he should have been seeking the removal of the American military either from Europe altogether, or its transfer far enough from the front lines to reduce meaingfully the odds of it getting entrapped in a new East-West conflict immediately. For those are the kinds of moves that would shrink to insignificance the chances of the United States getting hit by Russian nuclear warheads because of a combination of its forces being placed in a completely impossible position militarily, and because U.S. allies have been too cheap to pay for their own security.

Worst of all, though, far from moving U.S. forces away from the front lines of a Russian attack, Mr. Trump consistently has been moving them closer, by cautiously but steadily stationing more in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. And numerous reports have suggested that Poland is exactly where at least some of the 9,500 U.S. troops leaving Germany will be heading.

Because a final decision to transfer the troops to Poland hasn’t been made yet, there’s still hope that this potentially disastrous mistake can be avoided. But that outcome seems unlikely without a serious intervention from a Trump advisor influential enough to produce an about-face. Anyone out there know how I can get a hold of Jared, Ivanka, or Melania?

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Another Wuhan Virus Lesson Globalists Need to Learn

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alliances, allies, China, core deterrence, coronavirus, COVID 19, Eastern Europe, extended deterrence, globalism, Japan, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, North Korea, nuclear deterrence, nuclear war, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, South Korea, Soviet Union, tripwire, Western Europe, Wuhan virus

Here’s a seemingly off-the-wall question: What does the Wuhan Virus have to do with U.S. policy toward its global security alliances?

And here’s why it’s not only not a perfectly sensible and even vital question, but why the best answer is “Plenty”: Because these decades-old globalist arrangements now pose to America risks that look like the coronavirus-in-not-so-miniature. Even worse: The benefits to the United States these days are much more modest than  during the Cold War era when they were created.

The purely national security arguments should by now be familiar to RealityChek regulars. (See here and here for fuller descriptions of the points I’m about to summarize.) The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO – which has linked the United States, Europe, and Canada), and the bilateral security relationships between the United States and Japan and South Korea, originally aimed to prevent the Soviet Union from dominating global centers of economic and technological strength and potential, and therefore of military strength and potential.

In fact, these countries and regions were considered so important that American policy made clear that Washington was ready to wage nuclear war – with all the dangers such conflicts would create for the U.S. homeland. Moreover, because the allies (or protectorates, as many call them) understandably doubted that American leaders really would, when the chips were down, “sacrifice New York to save London,” Washington felt compelled to station the U.S. military directly in harm’s way.

The idea was never to stop Soviet or North Korean or Chinese aggression with conventional forces alone. Quite the contrary. These units were intended as trip-wires. The very likelihood that they’d be annihilated was supposed to put irresistable pressure on a U.S. President to respond to attacks with nuclear weapons. In turn, this prospect was supposed to deter U.S. adversaries from attacking in the first place.

Such an approach (called “extended deterrence” by the cognoscenti – as opposed to “core deterrence,” which sought to protect the United States itself) made obvious sense when the United States enjoyed a monopoly on nuclear weapons. It even made arguable (though less obvious) sense when the Soviets reached nuclear parity, and the Chinese developed their own rudimentary nukes.

Since the end of the Cold War, however, it’s made much less sense, and more recent developments have turned this nuclear umbrella border-line – and crazily – suicidal. For the Soviet Union is gone. It’s been partly replaced with a newly aggressive Russia, but the countries most threatened by Moscow are not the economic and technological giants of Western Europe, but the newer NATO members of Eastern Europe – whose security was never remotely vital to the United States, as evinced by the long decades they spent as Soviet satellites or actual parts of the former USSR.

In East Asia, nuclear forces both in China and in North Korea can now not only hit the United States (or in the case of Pyongyang, are rapidly approaching that capability). When it comes to China, these weapons’ launch platforms have become much more difficult for the United States even to find, much less take out before they can be used. In other words, for all the continuing and even growing economic and technological importance of Japan and South Korea – which is considerable – the nuclear threats to America from their leading potential adversaries have grown faster both quantitatively and qualitatively.

And in all these alliance cases, despite President Trump’s clear interest in a fundamentally new America First-type foreign policy, and even though the allies are amply capable of fielding the forces needed to defend themselves, they choose not to. Therefore, U.S. forces still serve as tripwires in both Europe and Asia.

It’s likely that the economic damage done to the United States from a North Korean nuclear nuclear bomb landing in a big American city or two wouldn’t compare to the coronavirus economic damage we’re seeing now and are likely to see. But who can doubt that this damage will be substantial in economic terms, and catastrophic from a humanitarian standpoint? And in the areas hit, the harm to businesses and their workers could well last much longer. Further, the impacts of the kind of much larger retaliatory strikes that could come from China (if it invades Taiwan) or Russia, would be that much greater.

And these prices paid for maintaining current alliance policies would be all the more unacceptable because they are now completely unnecessary – because of the allies’ capabilities, and because so many of the European countries now under this U.S. “nuclear umbrella” are so thoroughly marginal to America’s safety and prosperity.

The globalist supporters of these alliances insist that these risks are indeed acceptable largely because deterrence has made them so remote. That sounds ominously like the optimism expressed by so many Americans (myself included) the day(s) before the Wuhan Virus threat’s scale became all too real. Now it’s increasingly clear that the globalists’ favored policies of indiscriminate free trade and offshoring-happy globalization policies have gravely endangered the nation’s health security as well as its prosperity, at least in the near-term. Let’s not be needlessly blindsided by a calamity triggered by the globalists’ hidebound alliance policies.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: A Big Hint that America Finally Needs to Leave NATO

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alliances, allies, Article V, Cato Institute, defense spending, Europe, free-riding, globalism, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, nuclear war, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Pew Research Center, tripwire, Trump

Whenever I’ve written about America’s security alliances lately, I’ve emphasized the unacceptable dangers they pose to the nation’s safety because they commit the United States to risk nuclear attack to defend countries that clearly now don’t belong on the list of U.S. vital interests – that is, countries so important to America that their independence literally is worth the complete destruction of major individual cities and even genuine armageddon.

Earlier this week, however, a reminder has appeared about another crucial reason to ditch the granddaddy of these alliances – the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Revealingly, it also strongly bears out President Trump’s charges that U.S. allies in the region where they’re concentrated (Europe) have been shamelessly free-riding on the United States. Indeed, the new information also underscores how the allied defense deadbeats are not only ripping America off economically (which seems to be Mr. Trump’s main concern), but how their cheapskate defense budgets are fueling the nuclear risk faced by the United States.

The evidence comes in the form of a new survey of the populations of NATO member countries (including the United States) released by the Pew Research Center, and if you stopped with the headline (“NATO Seen Favorably Across Member States”) you’d understandably think that everything is just dandy in alliance-land. But check out the chart below, which for some reason doesn’t appear until the middle of the Pew report. Its central message should outrage the entire nation.

 

For it shows that although NATO populations are confident that the United States “would defend them from Russian attack,” they’re decidedly unenthusiastic about their own countries participating in the defense of another NATO member. Specifically, a median of 60 percent of residents of NATO Europe (along with Canada) countries express such confidence in America’s military (including nuclear) guarantee (versus 29 percent who are not so convinced). But by a 50-38 percent margin, they oppose their own country joining in.

Of the fourteen NATO members surveyed, populations in only four (the United Kingdom, Canada, Lithuania, and the Netherlands) favored using military force to defend a fellow NATO ally. Yet in only four (Turkey, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic) did majorities not expect the United States would use force to defend them.

The gap was widest in Italy (where only 25 percent favored helping defend another ally versus 75 percent believing that the United States would ride to its own rescue) and narrowest in the Netherlands (where the numbers were 64 percent and 68 percent respectively). The Italians also were the most confident in the United States in absolute terms, and tied with the Greeks for the least willing to help out. The only NATO members in which majorities supported both propositions were the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Lithuania.

Americans should be infuriated by these results for several intertwined reasons. First, the obligation to come to the defense of a fellow NATO member is at the heart of the alliance (and indeed of any alliance) and is spelled out in Article V of the NATO treaty. Although it’s true that members can always ignore legal obligations when push comes to shove, that’s long been much more difficult for the United States – because of its policy of stationing its own forces in many NATO countries (as well as in South Korea) to serve as “tripwires.” The idea has been that once they’re bloodied by attackers, and indeed about to be overwhelmed (because of their relatively small size) American Presidents will have no real choice but to respond with the U.S.’ equalizer – nuclear weapons.

This prospect was supposed to deter attack in the first place, and the (very) good news is that this strategy worked to keep the peace in Europe throughout the Cold War, and is still working. The bad news is that during the Cold War, the main European beneficiaries were countries whose independence was arguably vital to America – like the United Kingdom, (West) Germany, and France. Nowadays, the main beneficiaries are countries whose independence was never even during the Cold War viewed as vital to the United States – principally, the former Soviet bloc countries.

Yet although the stakes have shrunken dramatically, Washington continues to brandish the nuclear sword. And this risky American strategy remains in place – as it always has – because the European allies’ military forces have remained far too small and weak to repel a Soviet/Russian attack on their own, or with the help of modest U.S. non-nuclear forces. Worse, the Pew results also strongly suggest that if war did break out, American leaders could not for long even count on the help of allied forces even if it was provided initially. That’s an unparalleled recipe for disaster on the actual battlefield.

The Pew findings make the reason for this alarming situation glaringly obvious – the allies have skimped on their military spending out of confidence that the Americans would always answer their call. So why shouldn’t they save the big bucks that would be needed for genuine self-defense and use them for other purposes – like generous welfare states? Even better, the Americans would be left holding the nuclear risk bag, since once any conflict on the conflict escalated to that level, the nuclear conflict would be fought over their heads.

In addition, the Pew survey reinforces the results of a poll released last fall and alertly reported by my good friend Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute (who’s also just come out with an important new book on the subject).

Let’s be totally clear: This European approach has always made perfect sense from a European standpoint. But it not only makes no sense for the United States – it’s a strategy that creates the danger of national suicide because of decisions that still yoke the country’s fate to manifestly unreliable foreign publics.

Weirder yet: Avowedly America First champion President Trump has been steadily increasing the U.S. military presence in NATO’s most vulnerable – eastern European – members without having secured military spending increases from the other NATO countries that are remotely game changing.

It’s tough, therefore, to avoid the conclusion that America’s NATO allies are now giving Washington the broadest possible hint that it’s time for the United States to leave – because they’ve become utterly unreliable on top of their defense free-riding.  Why is the President acting as reluctant as any globalist to take it?

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: A China Fork-in-the-Road Coming for America First-ers?

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allies, America First, Barack Obama, China, deterrence, East Asia, globalism, industrial policy, Marco Rubio, national security, North Korea, nuclear deterrence, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, South Korea, Trade, tripwire, Trump

Something’s been bothering me for some time about the way that the national debate over dealing with China has been evolving.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s been great to see the major shift in the conventional wisdom since President Trump took office toward genuine recognition that the People’s Republic poses major economic and national security threats to the United States, that many of these threats are closely related, and that they have to be dealt with both on the economic and national security policy fronts.

That’s tremendous progress from the pre-Trump – and globalist – consensus that greater U.S. economic engagement with China was promoting more economic and political freedom in China, and more peaceful international behavior (or definitely would in some indefinite future), and that any dangers emanating from Beijing in the national security sphere are best coped with by increasing America’s military presence in East Asia (e.g., former President Barack Obama’s “pivot to Asia,” largely rhetorical though it was), cooperating more closely with the country’s allies in the region, or some combination of the two.

You don’t have to be an avid follower of world affairs to realize that the sharp distinction drawn by this globalist consensus between China economic and China national security policy was already producing a mind blowingly idiotic result: Washington was still resolving to resist any expansionist ambitions of Beijing’s in East Asia while continuing to help send China’s way floods of money and defense-relevant technology bound to turn into formidable military equipment that U.S. and other allied forces would face if conflict broke out.

Further, as I began pointing out years ago, because of the impressive progress made by both China and North Korea in developing intercontinental-range nuclear weapons, the globalist approach was exposing the American homeland to an ever increasing threat of nuclear attack – and mainly because even the U.S.’s wealthiest regional allies refused to field the (admittedly) expensive conventional military forces that could repel aggression from Beijing or Pyongyang without American help.

So everyone should be encouraged by the growing, bipartisan support for limiting the flow of U.S. resources and technology to China – even though many allegedly converted globalists continue hoping in vain that this goal can be achieved without setting limits (like tariffs) on trade and investment between the two economies.

My problem? Many of the new China hawks (and the leading example here is Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio, who deserves considerable credit for his out-front role waking up other conservatives to the need for changing course on China) apparently believe that new U.S. trade, investment, and technology transfer curbs are mainly needed to shore up America’s decades-long position as the national security kingpin of East Asia. In other words, they’re hoping that America First-type China economic and technology policies can buttress globalist East Asia policies.

Maybe they’re right.  And if they succeed, it will at least become less likely that American troops will be killed in battle by Chinese weapons developed with dollars and knowhow from the United States.

Unfortunately, too much of the nuclear danger to the United States will remain in place – because the free-riding instincts of America’s East Asian allies inevitably will be reinforced. That is, the more confident they stay in America’s determination to protect them, the less military effort they’ll feel the need to make, and the longer U.S. military forces in places like South Korea will be needed to play tripwire roles – deterring aggression due to their vulnerability to attack and the chances that their imminent destruction will pressure a U.S. President to save them with nuclear weapons use that could trigger a similar retaliatory strike on the United States.

As I’ve written repeatedly, because taking every step possible to prevent a nuclear weapon from landing on American soil should be a much higher priority for Washington than protecting free-riding allies, it’s best for the United States to pull its troops back from the front-lines in East Asia and force its allies to defend themselves. And if this means okaying their own decisions to build nuclear forces, fine with me. I’d also sell them any conventional weapons they’re seeking – which would achieve the added benefit of improving American economic growth and employment.

Does this mean that an America First China policy would or should lack any national security dimension? Not at all. For as I first explained in this recent interview, staying ahead of China technologically will stay imperative for the United States to protect itself from the kinds of cyber-attacks Beijing is already capable of waging and has probably been sponsoring. And the threat is hardly limited to the hacking of U.S. government agencies or private businesses that originates from China. The more Americans (including individual Americans possessing valuable knowledge) use Chinese technology products because these goods have become the world’s best or cheapest, the more their privacy will be vulnerable to Chinese surveillance and ultimately blackmail. The advanced telecommunications equipment produced by Huawei is of course the most important example so far.

There’s another technology-based national security issue that purist America First-ers of my ilk need to deal with as well, and one that I haven’t sufficiently thought through. Nothing’s changed my mind about the United States being a big net loser from trade with East Asia, or about how it can retain the clout if needs in the solely from its role as a final consumption market these export-dependent economies will desperately need.

But thanks largely to failed globalist trade policies, most of the world’s semiconductor manufacturing capacity and capability is now located in East Asia – particularly in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. It may be tempting to believe that these countries will become more resistant to China’s power if the United States withdraws militarily from the region. But prudence counsels against simply assuming the best.

So as America First leaders start and keep offering these countries all the military hardware they need to rebuff Chinese advances, they will also need greatly to step up efforts to restore U.S. self-sufficiency in these key building blocks not only of high tech industry, but increasingly of all high value manufacturing and services. (To their credit, Rubio and some other new China realists also understand the need for redoubled American industrial policy efforts to achieve these goals.)

Attempts to reorient U.S. foreign and trade policies in America First directions are still at such an early stage that concern about these differing emphases might look premature. But events have a way of forcing major decisions much earlier than expected – either because crises erupt sooner, or because lead-times to implement new strategies can be longer, than is convenient. So all America First-ers should agree at least agree that the earlier this potential division in America First ranks is addressed, the better.