Im-Politic: The Washington Post Goes All Fake News on Trump, Biden, and the UN

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Anne Gearan, Ashley Parker, Biden, election 2020, General Assembly, Im-Politic, Joe Biden, Mainstream Media, Philip Rucker, Trump, Ukraine, UN, United Nations, Washington Post

On Sunday, I wrote about an Associated Press article dealing extensively with manufacturing that I said might not have been Fake News, but sure came close. Today, the Washington Post published an article about President Trump’s activities at the UN General Assembly meeting in New York City that unquestionably deserves that label.

The theme of the article was made clear by the headline: “Trump uses U.N. meeting to wage domestic political attack on Biden.” Sounds pretty disgraceful, right? I mean, after all, every September the world’s leaders gather for this event, and address weighty issues ranging from threats to peace to climate change (a big focus this year). And here comes this notoriously egomaniacal and selfish boor of an Oval Office occupant determined to ignore his responsibilities as steward of the national interest and global leader – and the tradition of domestic politics stopping at the water’s edge. Instead, all he cared about was using this solemn conclave to slime former Vice President Joe Biden, a likely opponent during the next presidential election campaign.

As often not the case these days, moreover, the article itself faithfully reflected the header. According to authors Anne Gearan, Philip Rucker, and Ashley Parker, the President “turned” the General Assembly, “where foreign leaders converged to confront climate change and other global pandemics, into the backdrop for an assault on a domestic political opponent.”

They continued: “Trump used his meetings with heads of state to flay Biden, celebrate his personal attorney’s altercations and tend to his media feuds.”

For good measure, they wrote that Mr. Trump “seemed to revel in the opportunity to kick up dust around Biden, who has led Trump in virtually every public poll for several months.”

In other words, could the President be more of a reckless lout?

Readers were also told that participants in the global gathering were “baffled by the sudden interjection of a complex Trump scandal that they found mystifying.” And the authors dutifully quoted (globalist) “experts” to validate their emphasis on the President’s allegedly alarming weirdness:

“‘It puts foreign leaders in a difficult if not impossible position,’ said Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. ‘How do you manage this complicated person who doesn’t play the game by the rules, and how do you somehow protect this important relationship? Everybody’s a bit wary.’

“Victoria Holt, managing director at the Henry L. Stimson Center, said the arcane details of the Ukraine story and its overlap with U.S. politics are largely beside the point for other leaders here. ‘I’m sure they are scratching their heads,” she said. “The United States is supposed to be leading on major issues” such as climate change.’”

Except a glancing reference in its paragraph completely destroyed the alarming premise of the article. As the authors briefly noted, the controversy over Mr. Trump’s own and the Biden family’s dealings with political leaders and oligarchs from Ukraine “hung over Trump’s first day at the annual U.N. meeting, beginning with a volley of shouted questions from journalists….”

Another unintentionally revealing observation: “Trump stayed away from the Ukraine topic in his only major prepared remarks of the day….”

That is, it wasn’t Mr. Trump who injected domestic politics into this year’s General Assembly and its work. It was journalists like the Post reporters. (Unless you attach lots of importance to the fact that the President tweeted about the subject beforehand – which the Post reporters clearly didn’t, since they devoted no other passages to it.) Talk about blaming the victim.

The Washington Post, of course, is the newspaper that throughout the Trump administration has been sanctimoniously warning that “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” As so often the case, though, it’s ignored how shamefully biased reporting by democracy’s supposedly impartial watchdogs represent an equally dangerous threat.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: More Childish Attacks on Trump

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alliances, allies, Council on Foreign Relations, foreign policy establishment, George H.W. Bush, Greece, IMF, International Monetary Fund, international organizations, internationalism, Iran deal, JCPOA, Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, journalists, Mainstream Media, media, military bases, NAFTA, New Zealand, North American Free Trade Agreement, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Paris climate accord, Philippines, Richard N. Haass, Ronald Reagan, TPP, Trans-Pacific Partnership, Trump, UN, UNESCO, United Nations, Withdrawal Doctrine, World Bank, World Trade Organization, WTO

I’m getting to think that in an important way it’s good that establishment journalists and foreign policy think tank hacks still dominate America’s debate on world affairs. It means that for the foreseeable future, we’ll never run out of evidence of how hidebound, juvenile, and astonishingly ignorant these worshipers of the status quo tend to be. Just consider the latest fad in their ranks: the narrative that the only theme conferring any coherence on President Trump’s foreign policy is his impulse to pull the United States out of alliances and international organizations, or at least rewrite them substantially.

This meme was apparently brewed up at the heart of the country’s foreign policy establishment – the Council on Foreign Relations. Its president, former aide to Republican presidents Richard N. Haass, tweeted on October 12, “Trump foreign policy has found its theme: The Withdrawal Doctrine. US has left/threatening to leave TPP, Paris accord, Unesco, NAFTA, JCPOA.” [He’s referring here to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal that aimed to link the U.S. economy more tightly to East Asian and Western Hemisphere countries bordering the world’s largest ocean; the global deal to slow down climate change; the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization; the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – the official name of the agreement seeking to deny Iran nuclear weapons.]

In a classic instance of group-think, this one little 140-character sentence was all it took to spur the claim’s propagation by The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Marketwatch.com, Vice.com, The Los Angeles Times, and Britain’s Financial Times (which publishes a widely read U.S. edition).  For good measure, the idea showed up in The New Republic, too – albeit without mentioning Haass.

You’d have to read far into (only some of) these reports to see any mention that American presidents taking similar decisions is anything but unprecedented. Indeed, none of them reminded readers of one of the most striking examples of alliance disruption from the White House: former President Ronald Reagan’s decision to withdraw American defense guarantees to New Zealand because of a nuclear weapons policy dispute. Moreover, the administrations of Reagan and George H.W. Bush engaged in long, testy negotiations with long-time allies the Philippines and Greece on renewing basing agreements that involved major U.S. cash payments.

Just as important, you could spend hours on Google without finding any sense in these reports that President Trump has decided to remain in America’s major security alliances in Europe and Asia, as well as in the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (along with a series of multilateral regional development banks).

More important, you’d also fail to find on Google to find any indication that any of the arrangements opposed by Mr. Trump might have less than a roaring success. The apparent feeling in establishment ranks is that it’s not legitimate for American leaders to decide that some international arrangements serve U.S. interests well, some need to be recast, and some are such failures or are so unpromising that they need to be ditched or avoided in the first place.

And the reason that such discrimination is so doggedly opposed is that, the internationalist world affairs strategy pursued for decades by Presidents and Congresses across the political spectrum (until, possibly, now) is far from a pragmatic formula for dealing with a highly variegated, dynamic world. Instead, it’s the kind of rigid dogma that’s most often (and correctly) associated with know-it-all adolescents and equally callow academics. What else but an utterly utopian ideology could move a writer from a venerable pillar of opinion journalism (the aforementioned Atlantic) to traffick in such otherworldly drivel as

“A foreign-policy doctrine of withdrawal also casts profound doubt on America’s commitment to the intricate international system that the United States helped create and nurture after World War II so that countries could collaborate on issues that transcend any one nation.”

Without putting too fine a point on it, does that sound like the planet you live on?

I have no idea whether whatever changes President Trump is mulling in foreign policy will prove effective or disastrous, or turn out to be much ado about very little. I do feel confident in believing that the mere fact of rethinking some foreign policy fundamentals makes his approach infinitely more promising than one that views international alliances and other arrangements in all-or-nothing terms; that evidently can’t distinguish the means chosen to advance U.S. objectives from the objectives themselves; and that seems oblivious to the reality that the international sphere lacks the characteristic that makes prioritizing institution’s creation and maintenance not only possible in the domestic sphere, but indispensable – a strong consensus on defining acceptable and unacceptable behavior.

One of the most widely (and deservedly) quoted adages about international relations is the observation, attributed to a 19^th century British foreign minister, that his nation had “no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.” Until America’s foreign policy establishment and its media mouthpieces recognize that this advice applies to international institutions, too, and start understanding the implications, they’ll keep losing influence among their compatriots. And rightly so.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: An Empty Obama UN Farewell

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assimilation, education, geopolitics, global integration, globalization, international law, international norms, Islam, labor standards, Middle East, Muslims, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, radical Islam, reeducation, refugees, skills, sovereignty, TPP, Trade, trade enforcement, training, Trans-Pacific Partnership, UN, United Nations

National leaders’ speeches to each year’ UN General Assembly – even those by American presidents – are rarely more than meaningless boilerplate or cynical bloviating. But President Obama’s address to the organization yesterday – as with some of its predecessors – is worth examining in detail both because it was his last, and because Mr. Obama clearly views such occasions as opportunities to push U.S. and international public opinion in fundamentally new directions where they urgently need to head.

In yesterday’s case, the president saw his mission as justifying his belief that Americans in particular need to reject temptations to turn inward from the world’s troubles, and more completely embrace forces that inexorably are tightening international integration economically and even in term of national security.

To be fair to Mr. Obama, he sought to offer “broad strokes those areas where I believe we must do better together” rather than “a detailed policy blueprint.” But even given this caveat, what’s most striking is how many of the big, tough questions he (eloquently) dodges.

Here’s the president’s main premise and conclusion:

“…I believe that at this moment we all face a choice. We can choose to press forward with a better model of cooperation and integration. Or we can retreat into a world sharply divided, and ultimately in conflict, along age-old lines of nation and tribe and race and religion.

“I want to suggest to you today that we must go forward, and not backward. I believe that as imperfect as they are, the principles of open markets and accountable governance, of democracy and human rights and international law that we have forged remain the firmest foundation for human progress in this century.”

This passage makes clear that Mr. Obama doesn’t buy my thesis that the United States is geopolitically secure and economically self-sufficient enough in reality and potential to thrive however chaotic the rest of the world. Nor does he believe the converse – that the security and prosperity the nation has enjoyed throughout its history has first and foremost stemmed from its own location, and from its ability to capitalize on its inherent advantages and strengths, not from cooperating or integrating with the rest of the world.

The president’s contention that “the world is too small for us to simply be able to build a wall and prevent it from affecting our own societies” rings true for most countries – even assuming that he doesn’t really think that this stark choice is the only alternative to complete openness to global developments and commerce and populations and authority, however promising or threatening. But he seems oblivious to America’s “exceptionalism” geopolitically and economically.

Even if I’m wrong, however, and even accepting Mr. Obama’s “broad strokes” objectives, this lengthy presidential address gives national leaders and their citizens almost no useful insights on how countries can achieve his goals. Here are just two examples:

The president recognizes the need to make the global economy “work better for all people and not just for those at the top.” But given the trade deals he himself has sought, how can worker rights be strengthened “so they can organize into independent unions and earn a living wage”? The president insisted again that his Pacific Rim trade deal points the way. But as I’ve noted, the immense scale of factory complexes even in smallish third world countries like Vietnam makes the necessary outside monitoring and enforcement impossible.

Similarly, no one can argue with Mr. Obama’s recommendation to invest “in our people — their skills, their education, their capacity to take an idea and turn it into a business.” But as I documented more than a decade ago in my The Race to the Bottom, governments the world over, including in the very low-wage developing world, recognize the importance of improving their populations’ skill and education levels. In addition, multinational corporations can make workers productive even in these very low-income countries – and continue paying them peanuts compared with wages in more developed countries. Why should anyone expect his recommendation to give workers in America a leg up?

It’s easy to sympathize with the president’s call “to open our hearts and do more to help refugees who are desperate for a home.” Who in principle is opposed to aiding “men and women and children who, through no fault of their own, have had to flee everything that they know, everything that they love,…”?

But as Mr. Obama indirectly admitted, many of these refugees come from a part of the world where “religion leads us to persecute those of another faith…[to] jail or beat people who are gay…[and to] prevent girls from going to school….” He also described the Middle East as a place where too often the “public space” is narrowed “to the mosque.”

It was encouraging to see him recognize the legitimacy – though perhaps not the necessity – of insisting “that refugees who come to our countries have to do more to adapt to the customs and conventions of the communities that are now providing them a home.” But is he blithely assuming success? And it was less encouraging to see him ignore the excruciatingly difficult challenge of adequately vetting migrants from war-torn and chaotic countries.

Finally, on the political side of integration, the president seems to lack the courage of his convictions. For despite his high regard for international law, and support for America “giving up some freedom of action” and “binding ourselves to international rules,” he also specified that these were long-term objectives – presumably with little relevance in the here and now. Indeed, Mr. Obama also argued that, even way down the road, the United States wouldn’t be “giving up our ability to protect ourselves or pursue our core interests….”

So it sounds like he’d relegate even future international law-obeying to situations that really don’t matter. Which is fine. But how that gets us to a more secure world is anyone’s guess.

It’s true that Mr. Obama will be leaving office soon, and that his thoughts no longer matter critically. But at the same time, American leaders have been speaking in these lofty globalist terms for decades. If the president is indeed right about global integration and the future, what a shame that he didn’t make more progress in bringing these ideas down to earth.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Obama’s UN Message was Squarely in America’s (Dubious) Diplomatic Tradition

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21st century rules, alliances, China, civil society, East Asia, Hillary Clinton, human rights, international organizations, NATO, NGOs, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, UN, WTO

Anyone could be forgiven for listening to President Obama’s just-completed speech to the UN General Assembly and wondering what on earth he thought he was doing. Even given the tendency for the most down-to-earth American presidents to turn into gasbags when addressing the world body, and his own quasi-messianic streak, Mr. Obama’s offering seemed noteworthy for ethereal boilerplate.

Especially at a time when aggressors are on the march in eastern Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia, just what did the president think he was doing in urging the assembled delegates to “reject fatalism or cynicism,” to throw away “a rule-book written for a different century,” to recognize “that we gain more from cooperation than conquest,” to “lift our eyes beyond our borders,”and to “meet our responsibility to observe and enforce international norms”?

After all, seated before him were representatives of the very governments responsible for so many of the woes and threats he bemoaned – whose leaders are, as per that famous 1960s saying, part of the problem, not part of the solution. Did the president really think that his inspiring words would convert regimes not only behind so much international violence, but that came to and maintain power through the barrel of a gun?

The best answer is “Of course not” – but not necessarily because Mr. Obama may be a closet cynic, or may be a mindless prisoner of American diplomatic convention, or may be trying to score some easy global propaganda points. All these characterizations may apply to the president. But he’s also remaining true to a longstanding principle of the internationalist ideology that has shaped American foreign policy since Pearl Harbor – and that also, worrisomely, is a major illusion. It’s the belief that the very structure of world politics, not just individual regimes, is not only in a state of flux, but moving steadily towards needed revolutionary change – and the corollary conviction that enlightened U.S. policies can hasten its arrival.

The change anticipated by President Obama, all of his predecessors, and the rest of America’s foreign policy establishment, is that the unit that has organized world politics for centuries – the nation-state – is not only fundamentally harmful, but transient. Therefore, Washington within reason should be actively undermining it and planning for its demise and replacement by global systems of cooperation.

At first, this sounds as naïve as Mr. Obama sounded in New York earlier today. After all, it’s common knowledge that the UN and other international organizations and international law itself are institutions and arrangements to which U.S. leaders pay lip service and ignore whenever convenient. And often this common knowledge is true. But often it’s not true, and in ways as important as they’re neglected.

The clearest example by far is the notion popularized by the president and Secretary of State Kerry, and mentioned again this morning, that the world is well on the way to adopting a set of new rules of statecraft that have made war obsolete and that center on peaceful dispute resolution. As is now painfully clear, China and especially Russia haven’t bought on – and the administration has clearly been surprised by their stubbornness.

International organizations themselves offer another important example. Not that the UN, in particular, hasn’t become almost completely marginal to American foreign policy. It has. Once the Cold War began, it was clear that the Security Council’s authority to prevent or end aggression could never be used in conflicts that really counted (the Korean war was a notable exception), and even after the Berlin Wall fell, it’s generally been too difficult to forge consensuses that include Russia and/or China (the first Persian Gulf war was a notable exception).

Nevertheless, in the early 1990s, the United States spearheaded the creation of another international organization – the World Trade Organization – that does have major enforcement authority. And even though success in the global economy has become ever more important to both American prosperity and security, the WTO has frequently ruled against the United States and Washington has adopted and observed a policy of abiding by these decisions.

Yes, the WTO has strongly served the interests of offshoring U.S. multinational corporations – by ensuring that the U.S. market will remain almost completely open to all the goods they produce in their foreign factories. But most trade policy critics in Congress also regularly vote to maintain America’s membership. And although their support reflects the power of inertia in politics and policy, it also stems from the view that, whatever short-term or individual losses may result, the entire U.S. economy’s long-term interests are best served by creating a durable system for legally resolving international trade disputes.

This belief in a better global future lies behind American policy towards another kind of arrangement – military alliances. America’s main alliances – with NATO’s European members and Canada, and with Japan – have been in place for some six decades. As frequently declared, their main purposes were coldly pragmatic – to keep these strategically and economically valuable regions in the free world, to ensure that the United States would not be fighting its enemies alone, and to maximize the odds that aggressors would be fought “over there” rather than “over here.”

But Washington had an agenda that was never fully voiced to the American public: Although U.S. leaders constantly sought greater allied defense contributions, they also wanted to make sure that America predominated, and in fact would obviate the need for Germany and Japan in particular to take major responsibility for their own security in the first place. If these wartime enemies could be freed to concentrate on their own peaceful development, the main sources of instability and conflict in these two major regions would be eliminated, and transnational economic integration and collective security regimes could emerge. (These U.S. hopes have proved far more realistic in Europe than in Asia.)

All the strategy required were military expenditures that badly strained U.S. and ultimately global finances, and trade policies that gave these regions unreciprocated access to U.S. markets and helped hollow out America’s productive economy.

And yet, transformational hopes also unmistakably explain why, after the end of the Cold War, America’s alliance strategy literally never skipped a beat. After the overriding security reasons for these arrangements’ very existence either disappeared or morphed dramatically (in the case of China), Washington worked overtime to concoct series of new rationales and missions, continuing to run outsized risks and pay outsized costs in order to turn the age-old political dynamics of Europe and the Far East into…something better.

President Obama’s UN speech today prominently displayed another dimension of this belief in the transience of nation-states – the conviction that the importance of their national governments is on the wane, and that non-governmental actors are on the rise in world politics. In this sense, for much of his speech, Obama didn’t view his principal audience as the delegates seated in Turtle Bay. Instead, he was addressing “the Lebanese factions rejecting those who try to provoke war;” “ young people across the Muslim world”; entrepreneurs in Malaysia; the young Iraqi man who “started a library for his peers”; civil society in Senegal; and the like.

He was addressing these inspirational individuals and groups to help spread their example. But he was also sending a message that Washington has continually transmitted to the developing world – often albeit inconsistently and uncertainly – that the United States will be just as happy to do official business with non-government actors as with their repressive leaders. And the reason has not only to do with a feeling of moral satisfaction, or a confidence that these individuals and groups represent the future, but because the institutions and networks they create are thought to matter greatly in the here and now.

Mr. Obama’s former chief diplomat, Hillary Clinton, recently provided a sense of how central to American foreign policy this cultivation of what’s called civil society has become.

As she wrote in her Washington Post review of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s new book on American foreign policy, she took the helm at Foggy Bottom recognizing that “new technologies” could “help citizens hold leaders accountable” as well as “help dictators keep tabs on dissidents.” She understood that “non-state actors,” including “courageous NGOs” were steadily growing in influence. She realized that “International problems and solutions are increasingly centered, in ways both good and bad, on nongovernmental organizations, businesses and individual citizens.”

And because “foreign policy is now as much about people as it is about states,” America’s “levers of leadership are not just about keeping our military strong and our diplomacy agile; they are about standing up for human rights, about advancing the rights and role of women and girls, about creating the space for a flourishing civil society and the conditions for broad-based development.”

The promise inherent in these insights should be self-evident, simply because the list of consequential international actors has expanded qualitatively. Unfortunately, the dangers are easily overlooked. They could blind U.S. leaders to difficult but inescapable tradeoffs, leading them to pursue the (supposed) perfect instead of the good. They could addict them to grandiose, unattainable, and unnecessary schemes and obscure the viability and often the necessity of mere muddling through. They could prevent them from promptly pulling the plug on loser projects. And they could turn reduce the nation’s approach to key individual and clusters of challenges into complete mush – not least of all in the eyes of leading adversaries.

A great example: Secretary Clinton’s description of the Asia strategy she and the president pursued – which she writes “centered on strengthening our traditional alliances; elevating and harmonizing the alphabet soup of regional organizations, such as ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) and APEC (the ¬Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation organization); and engaging China more broadly — both bilaterally, through new venues such as the Strategic and Economic Dialogue, and multilaterally, in settings where regional pressure would encourage more constructive behavior and shared decision-making on matters from freedom of navigation to climate change to trade to human rights. Our ‘pivot to Asia,’ as it came to be known, is all about establishing a rules-based order in the region that can manage the peaceful rise of new powers and promote universal norms and values.”

To which one can only reasonably respond “Huh?” and “No wonder the Chinese are on the move.”

American leaders are often admonished (especially by each other) to deal with the world as it is, not as they would wish it to be. But it’s increasingly clear that a big problem with U.S. foreign policy is a strong penchant for defining this distinction out of existence to begin with.