Our So-Called Foreign Policy: So JFK on Cuba Should be Trump’s North Korea Model?

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Bay of Pigs, Cold War, Cuba, Cuban Missile Crisis, Fidel Castro, John F. Kennedy, Kim Jong Un, Michael Dobbs, Nikita Khrushchev, North Korea, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Robert E. Kelly, Soviet Union, The National Interest, Trump, Turkey, Vienna summit

The race for this year’s foreign policy chutzpah award couldn’t be tighter. Just when I thought political scientist Robert E. Kelly had grabbed an insurmountable lead with his new National Interest article downplaying the horror of a possible North Korean nuclear strike on the United States, along came Michael Dobbs with a jaw-dropping venture into fake history-land masquerading as an op-ed in yesterday’s Washington Post.

Dobbs’ achievement? An article comparing President Trump’s performance in the North Korea crisis so far with former President John F. Kennedy’s in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis that failed to mention either the April, 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion: the June, 1961 U.S.-Soviet summit in Vienna: or the way in which the October, 1962 U.S.-Soviet showdown in the Caribbean actually ended.

According to Dobbs, a former Post correspondent turned historian (chiefly of the Cuban crisis), Kennedy was a model of reasonableness and restraint whose unique, “overarching sense of history” led him “to consider the interests of future generations of Americans, and ultimately all of humanity” and thus deserves much credit for preventing the showdown from turning into an apocalyptic nuclear war.

As Dobbs put it (employing terminology used in a contemporary letter from Kennedy’s wife, Jackie), the former president acted like a “big man” who knows “the needs for self-control and restraint.” Mr. Trump, however, has “indulgently” decided to “play chicken” and respond in kind to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un’s “explosive rhetoric” – a dangerous effort to “out-crazy” Pyongyang that reflects a “little man” outlook “moved more by fear and pride.”

But the Bay of Pigs invasion is kind of important because Kennedy’s support for this disastrously failed attempt by CIA-supported Cuban exiles to overthrow Fidel Castro persuaded Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to reach a secret deal with Havana to deploy medium-range missiles in Cuba in the first place – in part to deter another attack either by Cubans or by the United States. So the former President’s actions (which, to be sure, continued a policy of his predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower) were largely responsible for creating the Soviet gambit in the first place.

Just as bad, as Kennedy admitted, his failure to order nearby American forces to come to the overwhelmed exile army’s rescue “no doubt” convinced “his superpower rival…that ‘I’m inexperienced. Probably thinks I’m stupid. Maybe most important, he thinks that I had no guts.'” The source for this passage? Dobbs’ own missile crisis history.

Has President Trump approved any similarly reckless blunders that sent such dangerous messages? No.

The Vienna conference is kind of important because this first meeting between the American and Soviet leaders reinforced Khrushchev’s impression of his Cold War counterpart as a weakling. According to one account of the summit and its aftermath:

“‘Roughest thing in my life,’ Kennedy had told James Reston of The New York Times, after it was all over. ‘He just beat the hell out of me.’ Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was contemptuous of his boss’s performance. ‘Khrushchev scared the poor little fellow dead,’ he told his cronies. British prime minister Harold Macmillan, who met with Kennedy shortly after he left Vienna, was only slightly more sympathetic. He thought that the president had been ‘completely overwhelmed by the ruthlessness and barbarity of the Russian Chairman.'”

The source for this passage? That same Dobbs missile crisis history.

Have any of President Trump’s exercise in personal diplomacy failed so utterly? No.

Finally, the Cuban crisis’ resolution is kind of important because Kennedy had a relatively easy out: an offer to remove U.S. missiles stationed in neighboring Turkey that Moscow (understandably) viewed as too close for comfort. This central element of crisis-ending deal struck by Kennedy and Khrushchev was kept secret (at Washington’s insistence), but it’s importance is now recognized by the historical community – including Dobbs.

Does President Trump have a comparable option? Evidently not – unless you count my proposal to pull American troops out of South Korea, which would remove any remotely plausible reason for North Korea to threaten U.S. territory, and turn the problem of handling North Korea’s nuclear forces over to its powerful and wealthy neighbors. Yet no American political leaders on any point on the political spectrum have expressed any support.

Dobbs of course has every right to idolize Kennedy and slight Trump. What he has no right to do after this piece of propaganda is to present himself as anything but a hack.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Obama’s Worrisomely Mixed Signals on Paris

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France, Francois Hollande, G20, Iraq, ISIS, law enforcement, Middle East, NATO, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Paris, Paris attacks, Syria, terrorism, Turkey

We keep learning more and more about the Paris attacks’ crucial details, and there’s surely more to come. Yet along with the early implications and lessons I discussed yesterday, another big trend is becoming crystal clear: President Obama’s verbal response so far has been remarkably tepid, and arguably confused. More serious, it’s contrasted strikingly with what we’ve heard from France’s President Francois Hollande about the strikes – which indicates that two of the most important countries in the coalition opposing the terrorists who are likely responsible see the threat in significantly different ways that could hamper any responses.

On Friday night, in the midst of the attacks, the French leader did refer to the assaults as a “crime.” But he emphatically changed his tune by Saturday. Those remarks described the attacks as “an act of war” that was “prepared, organised and planned from outside the country by Islamic State, but with help from inside.” He added, “We will be merciless toward the barbarians of Islamic State group.”

President Obama’s initial statement on Friday expressed appropriate outrage, and pledged America’s solidarity with France in “the fight against terrorism and extremism.” But he also continued a pattern of describing such events as law enforcement challenges, terming the attacks “crimes” and vowing to “do whatever it takes to work with the French people and with nations around the world to bring these terrorists to justice….” Although Obama mentioned the need to “go after any terrorist networks that go after our people,” his unwillingness “to speculate at this point in terms of who was responsible” prevented him from connecting these efforts to the military efforts he has authorized against ISIS.

Since then, the White House has issued statements agreeing with the “act of war” description. But these statements (so far) haven’t come from the president himself. Speaking on the eve of the summit in Turkey of the G-20 countries (the world’s twenty largest economies), Mr. Obama mentioned that “as a NATO ally [of Turkey’s] we have worked together to bring about pressure on ISIL” in order to “eliminate the environment in which ISIL can operate.” But he again mentioned “hunting down the perpetrators of this crime [in Paris] and bringing them to justice.”

Again, I don’t favor seeking ISIS’ military defeat, because even if it’s achieved, the terminally dysfunctional Middle East will soon enough serve up a comparable threat. Instead, U.S. military operations in the region should focus on keeping ISIS off balance long enough to hamper its capacity to carry out international operations until Washington can secure the border tightly enough to protect the U.S. homeland from terrorism.

But if the president does mean to fight ISIS abroad principally, he needs to figure out whether he’s going to be a commander-in-chief or a police chief, and work as effectively as possible with as many allies as he can. And as the Paris attacks make terrifyingly clear, time isn’t on his side.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: With Allies Like These Against ISIS….

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allies, ISIS, Kurds, Middle East, Obama, oil revenues, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Turkey

It’s lucky for President Obama that ongoing American fears about ebola and most recently yesterday’s shootings in Canada have distracted so much public and media attention from the fight against ISIS terrorists in the Middle East.

About a month and a half after the president unveiled his strategy to defeat the Islamic army, U.S. air strikes and military aid have for the moment blunted its advance on the town of Kobani near the border of Syria and Turkey, and saved thousands of Yazidi refugees from ISIS massacre or enslavement. But the jihadis continue scoring victories in Iraq, and Mr. Obama has acknowledged that meaningful victory “won’t be quick.“

Even more disturbing, however, have been the obstacles Washington has faced in building a viable international coalition to wage the war against ISIS and to prevent the United States from having to reintroduce significant combat forces into the region – a goal that often seems to be the president’s bottom line.

Mr. Obama has spoken repeatedly of how his success in constructing the coalition, and especially bringing regional governments on board, is showing that “the people and governments in the Middle East are rejecting ISIL and standing up for the peace and security that the people of the region and the world deserve.” But today, a senior Treasury Department official made clear just how exaggerated that encouraging claim remains.

In a speech in Washington, D.C., David Cohen, the Treasury official in charge of staunching the impressive revenue streams that have helped make ISIS so formidable, publicly accused “a variety of middlemen, including some from Turkey,” along with “Kurds in Iraq,” of selling and reselling ISIS-extracted and/or refined oil, and helping the organization earn more than $1 million per day from such energy sales.

Turkey, of course, is a NATO ally, and Kurds have been among ISIS’ main targets and victims, as well as U.S. aid recipients. Both Turkish and Iraqi Kurdish officials angrily denied the charges, but as Cohen broadly hinted, active government complicity hasn’t been necessary. ISIS’ Turkish and Kurdish business partners are part of “a long-standing and deeply rooted black market connecting traders in and around the area.”  In other words, these activities have long been – and continue to be – winked at by the regimes in question.

With allies like these, it’s difficult at best to see how the United States can defeat ISIS mainly working through a coalition, and thus avoid large-scale American ground involvement. If Mr. Obama believes that denying the terrorists an Afghanistan-like haven from which attacks on the American homeland ultimately can be planned and launched, he’ll need to adopt the only remaining strategy capable of promoting vital U.S. interests at acceptable levels of cost and risk.

As I’ve advocated, the United States will need to authorize much more extensive air and special forces operations. But the aim would not be to prosecute the kind of open-ended campaign(s) that would be needed not only to defeat ISIS but to contain all the successor and wannabe groups certain to pop up in the Middle East and other failed regions. Rather, the aim would be to keep ISIS (and any others) off balance and unable to turn to nation-building just long enough to enable the U.S. government to enhance further its already considerable energy self-sufficiency and to seal its borders. Thus protected from the only two major threats that Middle East terrorists could pose, Americans would be able to regard this terminally dysfunctional region with the indifference it so richly deserves.