Im-Politic: Fin de Trump? Again?

Tags

2016 election, Donald Trump Jr., establishment, healthcare, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, Immigration, Jared Kushner, Mitch McConnell, Paul Manafort, Paul Ryan, Republicans, Russia, Russiagate, Trade, Trump, Vladimir Putin

The latest Trump-Russia revelations make me feel like the Bill Murray character in “Groundhog Day.” I’ve already written posts to the effect that “[Candidate] Trump could really be in trouble this time.” I’ve also already written posts to the effect that “[Candidate] Trump could really be in trouble and this time it could be different.” Like practically everyone else I read and communicate with, I’ve been wrong on these scores, but I’ll be plowing the same fields again – if only because the circumstances are so extraordinary, and especially because so much is still unknown.

First, my bottom lines: I remain skeptical that the emails Donald Trump, Jr. released yesterday (after he was told they’d be published) will result in the end of his father’s presidency in any direct sense (i.e., impeachment and removal, or resignation). I remain equally skeptical of meaningful (and I know that’s an important qualifier, as I’ll discuss below) Trump-ian collusion with Russia’s government (which includes lots of operatives without official positions) to undermine his chief presidential opponent Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

I am, however, more convinced than I had been that what is different about the newest disclosures is that Washington will remain preoccupied with “Russiagate” for most of the rest of the President’s (first?) term, that they’ve just about ruled out any meaningful policy accomplishments through 2020, and that one reason is that Mr. Trump will have bigger reasons than ever to toe a standard Republican establishment policy line that’s highly unpopular even with his own base, but that’s still gospel with a Washington wing of the party whose loyalty is vital to his survival.

Second, let’s knock down the main talking points offered by Mr. Trump’s aides and other supporters (full disclosure: I support much of his agenda, and most of his establishment-bashing). As should be obvious, the failure of the Russian lawyer actually to produce any damaging information on the Clinton campaign does not absolve the president’s son – or son-in-law cum adviser Jared Kushner, or then campaign manager Paul Manafort, of the charges that they tried to cooperate with foreign agents to affect an American political campaign (the heart of the politically salient collusion charge).

The email exchange showed that this information was the principal reason that all three figures attended the meeting. Their motives are completely unaffected by the false pretenses under which they acted.

Just as obvious, and just as bogus, is Trump, Jr.’s claim that he and his colleagues viewed an offer from Russia as nothing special because the Russia-gate charges had not proliferated. Manafort, for example, formally joined the Trump campaign manager on March 29. Certainly by May 2 – a month before Trump, Jr. first heard about the supposed Russian information – Manafort’s longstanding lobbying for pro-Russia politicians in Ukraine was making news. As a result, even if the president’s son was politically inexperienced enough not to recognize the potential dangers, Manafort himself, a veteran Washington operative, surely knew the score.

Even more important, the Russia business ties of Trump, Sr. himself were being scrutinized and fretted about at least as early as March 15.

Have any laws been broken? Beats me. That’s now officially the responsibility of Robert Mueller, te Justice Department’s Special Counsel, to determine. But much of this uncertainty centers on how much is known about this meeting, and how much is known about similar activities. Further, neither impeachment nor the future of the Trump presidency will necessarily hinge on such legal questions. A president, as I’ve noted previously, can be impeached for anything the House of Representatives believes satisfies the definition of “high crimes and misdemeanors” – which itself is a political, not a legal, concept. The Senate, moreover, can remove a president from office for equally political reasons.

So public opinion will be crucial. There are no signs yet that Russia-related charges have significantly damaged President Trump’s support either with the general public or among Republicans. But the more such Russia-related material keeps coming out, the likelier such erosion becomes.

Nor will the president’s political support depend completely, or even largely, on politicians’ often less than steely backbones. The new Trump, Jr. emails – and the continuing and utter failure of anyone in the Trump circle (including the president himself) to provide straight, durable answers to perfectly reasonable questions – understandably revive questions of how extensively individuals associated in any significant way with Mr. Trump or his campaign worked with the Russian government to sway election results.

Until yesterday, as I’ve written, I’ve felt confident that no important collusion evidence would emerge because none had yet been leaked – even though the matter had been probed for months by several official and many unofficial investigations, and even though bureaucrats at the highest levels have been positively eager to reveal incriminating Trump information even if national security could be undermined.

In addition, it’s never been clear to me why Russian interference with the election ever required cooperation from the Trump campaign – or any other American source. As long as Moscow was so motivated, its formidable hacking and disinformation capabilities were amply capable of producing the desired results on their own. Moreover, the U.S. intelligence community’s January report on the Russian interference campaign itself reported that Russian leader Vladimir Putin was wary of praising candidate Trump too enthusiastically precisely for fear of generating a backlash.

At the same time, even the canniest political leaders and other figures don’t always behave logically or sensibly. It’s also now clear at least that many in the Trump circle have been less than canny or, when it comes to explaining controversial events, even minimally competent. As a result, as stated above, there’s now indisputable evidence of receptivity to collusion by three extremely influential Trump aides (including two family members).

If the June Trump, Jr. meeting represents the extent of the collusion, there’s still an excellent chance that the president ultimately will survive the Russia mess. After all, what kind of (serious) collusion effort, once started, would feature no follow up? But because no one close to Mr. Trump now enjoys (or deserves) much credibility on these matters outside hardcore Trump-supporter circles, Democrats now have the pretext they need to force the administration to keep trying to prove a negative – a challenge no one should relish. Special Counsel Mueller has a comparable justification for prolonging his own investigation considerably.

Yet even before the possible crumbling of the president’s political support, for either legal or political reasons or some combination of the two, the Trump administration’s Russia-related problems could profoundly impact the nation’s policy agenda – and not in a good way if you’ve hoped Mr. Trump would be an agent of serious change. Here’s what I mean.

Recall that last year, Mr. Trump did not simply assume the leadership of the Republican party after winning its presidential primaries. He engineered a hostile takeover, supplanting a party mainstream that strongly opposed him on his two signature issues – trade and immigration policies. The shocking Trump fall victory, however, gave the incoming president crucial leverage in this relationship, and for a very powerful, concrete reason. The Republicans’ establishment leaders in Congress gave his campaign, and especially the inroads he made with new constituencies, abundant credit for saving the party’s control of both the House and Senate.

Once the Russia-gate charges and Team Trump’s failures to address them adequately began gaining critical mass, though, the dynamics of this relationship began changing dramatically. President Trump’s future became more dependent on the establishment GOP’s support. Therefore, he needed to warm to its establishment agenda – notably their budget and healthcare proposals – despite the poor poll numbers they’ve been drawing. Additionally, his ability to reach across the aisle on promising areas of bipartisan agreement, like infrastructure, turned into a function of the overall party’s flexibility – which seems pretty limited to date.

Since such vast new – and, due to the Trump circle’s constantly changing responses, legitimate – investigative frontiers have been opened up by the new emails, the Trump wagon now looks to be hitched to the Congressional Republican star more tightly than ever. That’s not to say that House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will never stray from their party’s orthodoxy. McConnell, at least, has hinted that bipartisan compromise may be needed on healthcare. Moreover, the party establishment is by no means united on all major issues, either. Consequently, intra-party divisions may widen the scope for bipartisanship (as has generally been the case to avoid or mitigate various budget crises).

But the main point here is that at this point, these decisions are likeliest to be driven by the establishment, not the president. And the tragedy, at least for anyone rooting for the president or any of his agenda, is how many of the resulting White House political and policy wounds will have been entirely self-inflicted.

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Our So-Called Foreign Policy: A Non-Hysterical View of Trump’s Syria Strikes

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air strikes, America First, Bashir Al-Assad, chemical weapons, China, Middle East, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, summit, Syria, Trump, Vladimir Putin, Xi JInPing

I love the idea of the “procustean bed.” It’s a phrase inspired by Greek mythology that’s come to describe the deceptive practice of depicting every notable event or feature of reality as fitting into a preconceived view of how the world works. It’s become standard operating procedure in our highly balkanized, increasingly fact-challenged, and ever more hysteria-prone political culture, and it nicely explains most of the commentary and analysis that’s followed President Trump’s decision to attack a Syrian air base following chemical weapons use in that country’s tragic civil conflict.

I have absolutely no inside information here, but strongly believe that the likeliest explanation is one that can’t easily be spun to advance any particular agenda, and that focuses on a crucial variable bound to be neglected when the main objective is political.

Not that I’m ruling out any of the sets of talking points being pushed so aggressively by the nation’s chattering class. It’s entirely possible that the Syria decision shows that the president never intended to carry out the kind of broadly stand-aside foreign policy he most often (but not always) touted during his campaign, and that he has cynically betrayed his core, non-interventionist, voters. Or that he simply has a learning curve and is wisely admitting that the dangerous world he’s operating in doesn’t permit an America First approach to be carried out safely.

The Syria strikes could reveal how fundamentally incoherent his worldview and agenda are – and are likely to remain. Or how pragmatic he has become. Or how emotionally and thoughtlessly he reacts to perceived challenge or betrayal (specifically, by a client state of a Russian government he’s supposedly coddled until now). Or how cunningly he’s decided to undercut charges that he’s a puppet of Moscow’s. Or, given Mr. Trump’s utter unpredictability on so many fronts, the Syria attacks could simply underscore how he continues to be just as utterly unpredictable in the Oval Office as he was on the campaign trail – which could mean that the Trump move means absolutely nothing at all.

But although all these takes on Syria could in theory be true, I doubt their veracity mainly because they pay absolutely no attention to considerations that would weigh heavily on the mind of even the least competent chief executive (or presidential aides) – the international circumstances staring him in the face once the chemical weapons news came through.

That’s why there’s such a strong case for the following as the prime determinants of the Trump decision – and as reasons for interpreting its long-term effects with extreme caution. Specifically, when the president ordered the strikes, he was in the middle of a summit with the leader of a foreign power – China – that had rapidly emerged as America’s foremost economic challengers and as at least a potential strategic rival. The day before the summit with Xi Jinping began, North Korea conducted the latest of a series of ballistic missile tests it’s conducted since President Trump’s inauguration, and in defiance of multiple United Nations resolutions. And the day before that came the chemical weapons attack – which itself preceded a meeting in Washington, D.C. between Mr. Trump and King Abdullah of Jordan.

So during a week when the global spotlight shone on President Trump with unprecedented intensity came two apparent provocations. (I’m purposely leaving open the possibility that Syrian dictator Bashir Al-Assad is not to blame for the chemical weapons bombing, though I believe the evidence – particularly the reported flights of fixed-wing aircraft over the site – point to Syria’s guilt.) Further, both provocations came very early during the first Trump term – a period when foreign leaders would naturally feel strongly tempted to test a new president, and when all countries would view him with great uncertainty even were he a more conventional politician.

In my view, all these circumstances combined to convince the president that a forceful response of some kind was needed. And since North Korea can credibly threaten American allies with conventional military and even nuclear attacks, and Syria can’t, Assad was the inevitable target.

In other words, the Trump strikes right now are best seen as a simple message-sending exercise. And the messages itself were simple as well. Not that, “I’ve changed my foreign policy stripes” and not that “I’m ready to plunge much more deeply into the Syria and other Middle East conflicts” but that “I have my limits” and “I have no intrinsic qualms about using the vast military arsenal at my disposal.”

Because the extreme shortage of competent policy analysts with a Trump-ian worldview has left the president little choice but to rely heavily on conventional thinkers for briefings and advice on foreign policy and other matters, it’s entirely possible that his air strikes presage a more activist Middle East or overall international strategy. At the same time, nothing about the strikes makes such a transformation inevitable, and especially far-fetched (as they always have been) are claims that individual uses of military power are pointless (at best) unless carried out as part of a broader plan of action meant to win or acceptably resolve a foreign conflict.

Particularly in the case of the Middle East, where history and recent American experience clearly teach that no constructive solutions are possible (or at least not at acceptable cost and risk), and where due to developments such as the U.S. domestic energy production revolution, the national interests at stake are no longer unquestionably vital, individual military actions that send uncomplicated messages can have significant value in their own right – and all the more so as they inevitably will be heard in many other regions, including those that matter more.

So everyone is best advised to hold their horses as they go about interpreting the Trump Syria strikes and especially about what futures they supposedly guarantee and rule out. Indeed, no one should heed this kind of advice more closely than President Trump.

Im-Politic: The Trump-ers and the Russians

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2016 election, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, Jeff Sessions, Logan Act, Michael T. Flynn, Russia, Sergey Kislyak, Trump, U.S. intelligence, Vladimir Putin

The more I read about the firestorm that has erupted over possible contacts between officials of and advisers to President Trump’s campaign for the White House, his transition team, and members of his new administration on the one hand, and the Russian government and/or its agents on the other, the less sense any of it makes to me.

That goes double – at least – for the charge that is only rarely made explicit but that is central to this entire uproar: that Trump’s outsider nature and supposedly authoritarian, anti-democratic instincts opened the door to an alliance with Russian leader Vladimir Putin that aided his November victory. More specifically, insinuations have been made that figures either officially or unofficially associated with Mr. Trump “colluded” with the Russians in their efforts to undermine Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid.

Of course, the fire keeps getting fueled by the failure of the supposed Trump-ist conspirators to provide forthright answers to questions about their recent contacts with Putin’s aides and surrogates. By their own belated admissions now, the president’s briefly serving White House national security adviser Michael T. Flynn and his Attorney General, former Senator Jeff Sessions, held either meetings or communications with Russia’s ambassador to the United States during the transition and campaign, respectively, that they did not originally acknowledge.

Nothing could have been easier, the entirely reasonable argument goes, than for them to have been up front right away. Flynn, for example, is alleged to have broken with an important American tradition that only one person serves as president at a time when he spoke with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak about America’s anti-Russia sanctions. It’s true that former President Obama’s second term ran through midday, January 20, and that he and his officials alone possessed the authority to conduct the nation’s foreign relations. In addition, Flynn might have violated a law preventing private citizens from interfering with official American diplomacy – though it’s unclear whether the Logan Act applies to transition team officials like Flynn at the time.

But wouldn’t the former general have been much better off – let alone Mr. Trump – had he simply stated that he broached the subject of sanctions (as opposed to simply introducing himself and starting to get acquainted) because Russia is an important country and he wanted to help the administration hit the ground running?

And Sessions has now stated that his original answers at his Senate confirmation regarding such meetings assumed that the questions were focused on meetings dealing with his position in the Trump campaign and that concerned campaign matters. But why engage in such Clintonian parsing if everything was on the up and up?

After all, his first such contact with Kislyak took place at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, at a meeting co-sponsored by the Obama State Department. The second – also with Kislyak – took place in his Senate office, in September. As a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, what could be more natural than a lawmaker meeting with a representative of a major power? The answer? “Nothing.” Such events have become routine – and should be, if Congress is to play the important role in foreign policymaking assigned it by the Constitution. How difficult would it have been for Sessions to make these points in the first place?

One obvious retort is that the president’s enemies are so loaded for bear that even such reasonable explanations wouldn’t have satisfied them – and were likeliest to egg them on further. But it should be equally obvious that the real political prize here is the American middle, which historically has a knack for distinguishing the truth-tellers from the fear-mongers.

Even more bizarre, however (and that’s a high bar!), is the more fundamental notion that the Russians thought a concerted effort to fix the U.S. election was a stroke of genius. That may indeed have been the case – I sure don’t have any inside info on the Kremlin. But let me count the biggest reasons why Putin should have laughed out of his office anyone who made this proposal.

First, with his KGB background, Putin of all people should know that it’s almost impossible to keep any significant secrets in the American political world, let alone one this big. One major reason, of course – this plan would have had to have been kept from any number of foreign intelligence services as well, if only because so many other national governments have big stakes in American presidential elections, too.

Second, precisely because of these excellent chances of discovery, the upside of any successful election rigging would have been severely limited. Had Clinton won, after all, at least for the medium term, Moscow would have guaranteed that Barack Obama’s successor would have taken much harder-line anti-Russian positions across the board in American foreign policy. But even had the alleged plot succeeded, every word or action taken by Mr. Trump suggesting a more conciliatory policy would – as has been clear already – have come under the harshest suspicion. Indeed, the new administration has faced continuing heavy pressure to demonstrate what might be called some anti-Russia street cred – on top of already having named some prominent Russia hawks to key posts.

Third, the cost-benefit calculus of a political interference campaign looks even worse upon recalling the conventional wisdom that Mr. Trump was heading toward an historic defeat at the polls. Why take major chances on behalf of such a likely and big loser? In this vein, it’s fascinating to note that the January American intelligence community report on the Russian influence campaign suggested that the Kremlin (as with so many others) anticipated a Clinton win as late as election night.

Fourth, if Russian intelligence was even minimally competent, it would have known that a Trump presidency would have been more favorable to Moscow even without actively cooperation with his presidential campaign. For Mr. Trump had long criticized U.S. foreign policymaking for picking needless overseas fights that too often turned into bloody and hideously expensive quagmires (like the second Iraq war). And for even longer he had insisted that America’s military actions abroad be restricted to crises where the nation’s security was directly threatened.

But as indicated above, the American intelligence community has stated that Putin – although concerned about a “backfire” effect from direct Putin praise of candidate Trump – did in fact order precisely this kind of anti-Clinton, pro-Trump “influence campaign”. Given all the claims from every quarter of American politics that the Russian leader is a diabolically dangerous mastermind, this decision simply adds to my list of “Russia-gate” developments that I find completely mystifying.

Not that my own befuddlement means that there’s no fire behind any of this smoke, or that Russian interference in U.S. elections should be accepted simply because it might have been ineptly conceived or carried out. (What if Moscow or others one day get the hang of this?) Until and unless much more serious disclosures emerge, however, it could well mean that Trump-haters and the Mainstream Media need to hold their hysteria about the Trump-Russia connection. And the president and his team stop needlessly shooting themselves in their feet.

Im-Politic: Mainstream Media Trump Slandering that Lacks the Courage of its Convictions

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2016 election, Adolph Hitler, appeasement, Czechoslovakia, David Ignatius, Donald Trump, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, Mainstream Media, media bias, Munich, Neville Chamberlain, Russia, The Washington Post, Vladimir Putin

If David Ignatius’ new column on Donald Trump’s Russia policy thinking and leanings isn’t the low point of Mainstream Media coverage of the Republican presidential candidate, that’s only because the competition has been so cutthroat. This Washington Post pundit has just produced a masterpiece of smearing by insinuation that doesn’t even have the courage of its own convictions. Here’s what I mean.

Ignatius began the piece by directly comparing a Trump statement on the candidate’s confidence that he’d get along with Russian leader Vladimir Putin with former then-British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s infamous 1938 claim that he’d achieve “peace in our time” by acquiescing in Adolph Hitler’s annexation of a chunk of the former country of Czechoslovakia.

Right afterward, Ignatius admitted that “Political analogies are often unfair, especially ones that invoke the overused Munich parallel.” But in the very next sentence, he insisted that

“this one is worth considering: The problem with Trump isn’t (as some critics have argued) that he’s a reckless and potentially genocidal aggressor. No, the danger is that he’s precisely what he says he is — a dealmaker who thinks he could craft agreements with despots that could bring peace and security.”

Ignatius then repeated this pattern of slinging mud even he obviously doesn’t believe – apparently in the hope that some of it will stick. First, the charge that:

“Trump seems to see commitments made to smaller states as expendable in the process of making deals with the big guys. When he linked U.S. willingness to defend the Baltic states and other NATO allies to what they pay into the alliance, it was a Chamberlain-esque emphasis on national self-interest, as opposed to sticking your neck out for possibly undeserving little guys.”

Then the cover-your-butt qualification: “This idea of reaching agreements with Putin’s Russia isn’t crazy, any more than was Chamberlain’s desire to escape war in 1938.”

Ignatius did make a feeble stab at squaring this circle:

“[T]rump actually deserves credit for raising this issue early in the Republican primary debates. But any such negotiation must be done carefully and unsentimentally, without the mutual self-congratulation that has characterized Trump’s comments about Putin.”

In other words, the Republican candidate’s praise of Putin has been wildly out of bounds.  Perhaps Ignatius has forgotten former President George W. Bush’s widely quoted, “I looked the man [Putin] in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country.”

And in case you still have doubts that Trump’s remarks are anything but unprecedented, get a load of this passage from that same June, 2001 press conference, which hasn’t been so widely quoted: “I look forward to my next meeting with President Putin in July. I very much enjoyed our time together. He’s an honest, straightforward man who loves his country. He loves his family. We share a lot of values. I view him as a remarkable leader.”

Moreover, the rest of Ignatius’ case apparently rests on his assumption that Trump would give away the store immediately – presumably as opposed to his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. That would be the same Hillary Clinton who, as President Obama’s Secretary of State, was positively giggly as she sent her Russian counterpart and the world the unmistakable message – complete with corny prop – that the two countries could simply “reset” their relationship because Mr. Obama had just entered office.

In his close, Ignatius make a final attempt to tar Trump with a brush while absolving himself of any responsibility for alarmism: “We’re not in Neville Chamberlain territory, not even close. But this is a slippery slope, not just for Trump, but for the United States. ”

What couldn’t be clearer is that if anyone’s not only on but well down a slippery slope, it’s Ignatius. And it’s labeled “slander.”

Im-Politic: More Anti-Trump Media Bias – Including One Example That’s Homophobic

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amnesty, Bloomberg.com, deportation, Donald Trump, Gang of 8, Hillary Clinton, homophobia, illegal immigrants, Im-Politic, immigration reform, Jobs, John McCain, John Micklethwait, Labor Force Participation Rate, labor markets, LGBT, living standards, Mainstream Media, Mark Zandi, Max Ehrenfreund, media, media bias, part-time, productivity, The Washington Post, Vladimir Putin, wages

I sure hope all you RealityChek readers have had a great Labor Day weekend. Unless it was a complete disaster, it had to be better than the last few days’ performance just registered by the Mainstream Media.

On Sunday, I reported on a truly contemptible smear of white working-class Americans delivered by Time magazine uber-pundit Joe Klein. But published this weekend along with this display of mass character assassination was a swipe at Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump that can only be reasonably interpreted as homophobia, and an example of outright ignorance of the basic economic concept of productivity, and of recent U.S. labor market trends. For good measure, this second piece left out information on its main source that strongly suggests major political bias.

The homophobia was delivered courtesy of no less than John Micklethwait, the current Editor-in-chief at Bloomberg.com who previously held this post at The Economist. Think I’m exaggerating? See for yourself. In the course of an otherwise informative interview with Vladimir Putin, Micklethwait pressed the Russian president in this way for his views of Trump and his Democratic counterpart, Hillary Clinton:

“[Y]ou are really telling me that if you have a choice between a woman, who you think may have been trying to get rid of you, and a man, who seems to have this great sort of affection for you, almost sort of bordering on the homoerotic, you are really going to go for, you are not going to make a decision between those two, because one of them would seem to be a lot more favorable towards you?”

I had to go over this passage several times before convincing myself that I’d actually read it correctly. Even giving Micklethwait’s language the most charitable interpretation it deserves – that the journalist meant it simply as a joke – what exactly distinguishes it from the kind of sniggering locker-room-level humor that’s now recognized as demeaning and hurtful? Therefore, is it remotely plausible to doubt that Micklethwait himself believes that such emotions are fundamentally shameful, and that his attribution of such feelings toward Trump reveal a positively vicious bias against the maverick politician?

Here’s hoping that gay activist organizations come down hard on Micklethwait’s bigotry – and insist that his resignation is needed to guarantee the integrity of Bloomberg’s coverage of both American politics and LGBT issues.

The second major media stumble came in a Saturday Washington Post Wonkblog item spotlighting a claim that Trump’s immigration policies “could put Americans out of work.”

That’s of course an entirely valid and important possibility to report on, but author Max Ehrenfreund (and his editors) failed to fulfill a fundamental journalistic obligation by omitting from his article the unmistakable anti-Trump bias of Mark Zandi, the economist who came up with this finding. Yes, the piece mentioned that Zandi is a former aide to Arizona Republican Senator John McCain. But what it didn’t tell you is that McCain was a charter member of the “Gang of 8” – the bipartisan group of Senators that several years ago launched a powerful push for an amnesty-focused immigration reform bill. Nor did Ehrenfreund mention that Zandi has also contributed to Clinton’s presidential campaign – which has been pushing immigration reform proposals even more indulgent than the Gang’s.

As for the Zandi-Ehrenfreund case that Trump’s immigration policies would backfire powerfully on the U.S. economy, it could not have been more ignorant or incoherent economically. As Ehrenfreund explained it, “deporting [millions of] undocumented immigrants would increase costs for employers, because they would have to compete for the workers remaining in the United States, causing wages to rise.”

Full stop: Amnesty supporters have maintained for years that most illegals are simply filling “jobs that Americans won’t do.” Now they’re saying that if a the supply of American labor shrank due to deportation, increasing wages would summon forth replacements who are either native-born or legally residing in the country? Do tell! Ehrenfreund and Zandi might also have mentioned that robust wage increases have been one of the most conspicuously absent developments during the weak current U.S. recovery since it technically began some seven years ago.

Just as strange was the claim that “Already, the labor force has been shrinking as older workers retire, and the unemployment rate is under 5 percent, which suggests relatively few workers are looking for jobs.” Don’t Ehrenfreund and Zandi know that much of this shrinkage has taken place among working age women and especially men? Or that the number of Americans working part-time involuntarily still remains above pre-recession levels? In other words, there’s an enormous population in the United States that would bid for better-paying jobs.

Perhaps strangest of all is the Zandi-Ehrenfreund contention that “To compensate, businesses would have to increase prices. Some firms would lose customers and could be forced out of business. ‘Asking these folks to leave is going to put a hole in the economy that’s going to cost jobs,’ Zandi said. ‘It’s going to cost the jobs of American citizens.'”

That is, Zandi and Ehrenfreund have either omitted or ruled out the possibility that many companies will eventually respond instead by either automating and/or by otherwise improving their efficiency in ways that boost their productivity – thereby laying the ground for sustainable prosperity and living standard increases going forward. These two pessimists might believe that this venerable maxim of economics no longer holds, and that “this time it will be different.” But maybe they could do readers the courtesy of explaining why?

This Washington Post article’s descent into fakeonomics hardly stops here. But the above reasoning should be enough to establish its silliness – and to prompt the question if comparably doofy pro-Trump studies would ever see the light of day in the paper.

I closed my last post by asking why recent polls show Americans’ confidence in the media has stayed even in the low double-digits on a percentage scale. These Bloomberg and Washington Post pieces don’t merit even single-digit approval.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: America’s Real Russia Policy Scandal

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allies, Baltics, corruption, Jeffrey Goldberg, Leon Hadar, Moldova, NATO, NATO expansion, North Atlantic treaty Organization, nuclear weapons, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, The Atlantic, The National Interest, think tanks, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin

Scandalous charges have abounded recently in connection with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s support for recasting U.S.-Russia relations into a more cooperative mold. Trump has been accused to seeking rapport with Russian leader Vladimir Putin in return for promoting his business interests in the former Soviet Union. Some of his top aides have been identified as lobbyists for Russian interests. (As with China, even those that are called “private” are subject to state control.) And suspected Russian cyber-hacks that have revealed politically damaging material about the Democratic Party have fueled speculation that Moscow is working actively to put him in the White House.

Plenty of evidence shows significant business ties between Trump and his aides, on the one hand, and Russia, on the other. An especially thorough job of reporting on Trump himself can be found at this link. Of course, though it’s gone almost completely unreported, there are years’ worth of much more evidence of extensive relationships between the offshoring businesses that have lobbied very effectively for China in recent decades, and Trump’s rivals and critics. These include many of this year’s Republican presidential candidates, the so-called conservative intellectuals who work at think tanks funded heavily by these multinational companies, and Democratic Party leaders (chiefly from the Clinton wing) who have dependably backed Beijing-friendly policies. (See this Congressional testimony of mine on how the corporate funded think tanks have served as highly effective “idea launderers” for offshoring-happy business interests.)

In other words, there are few virgins in America’s political and policy establishment when it comes to serving unfriendly foreign interests, whether directly or indirectly.

All the while, however, an even more important scandal has been enveloping U.S.-Russia relations. It entails the way all these accusations are preventing an urgently needed national substantive debate – over whether the course of American policy has been boosting the odds of an East-West military clash that could be as completely unnecessary as it would be dangerous.

Specifically, the insinuation that only Putin toadies would oppose efforts to raise the military ante to prevent further Russia’s expansionism in European areas around its border has obscured a crucial reality: how Washington’s bipartisan decision to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance to Russia’s doorstep has created deadly risks to the U.S. homeland. Both Democratic and Republican presidents enthusiastically supported a policy that has saddled the nation with commitments to risk nuclear war over countries that (a) have never been considered important U.S. interests, largely because (b) they are located so close to Russia that they are completely indefensible with conventional forces.

Even worse, in recent years, the bipartisan Washington establishment has doubled down on this policy. In the face of Putin’s efforts to reestablish Russian hegemony in its so-called “near abroad,” American leaders have insisted not only that Washington reaffirm its intent to abide by its NATO commitment to view any attack on new members like the Baltic countries as a casus belli with Russia. Both Democratic and Republican establishmentarians have also called for admitting into NATO – and thereby extending American security guarantees over – countries like Ukraine and Moldova, which are even less defensible. (Indeed, during the 2008 presidential campaign, the Ukraine champions included major party nominees Barack Obama and John McCain.)

And because Western forces have no hope of defeating the Russian military in its own neighborhood, if Moscow did move in those circumstances, the United States and the rest of NATO would be placed in the position of threatening nuclear weapons use (and possibly following through, as per U.S. military doctrine) or suffering a humiliation that could dwarf that experienced in Vietnam (with all of its domestic and international repercussions).

To his credit, President Obama hasn’t accused Trump of pushing his Russia views for self-seeking reasons. But he’s played his own part in trying to ostracize Trump-like views by attributing them to the Republican nominee’s supposed ignorance about foreign policy matters generally, and about the ostensibly indisputable value of alliances like NATO.

Weirdly, however, although he has repeatedly endorsed the decades-long American commitment to risk nuclear attack on the U.S. homeland to protect any and all NATO members – however new and vulnerably located – as well as treaty allies in Asia, Mr. Obama also recently argued, in a lengthy interview with The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg, that forcibly attempting to resist Russia’s moves around its littoral would be foolhardy at best:

“‘The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-nato country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do,’” he said.

“I asked Obama whether his position on Ukraine was realistic or fatalistic.

“‘It’s realistic,’ he said. ‘But this is an example of where we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for.’”

And the president stated even more emphatically:

“[I]f there is somebody in this town that would claim that we would consider going to war with Russia over Crimea and eastern Ukraine, they should speak up and be very clear about it. The idea that talking tough or engaging in some military action that is tangential to that particular area is somehow going to influence the decision making of Russia or China is contrary to all the evidence we have seen over the last 50 years.”

What the president doesn’t seem to understand, though, is that these sensible arguments and cautions also apply to the Baltics – which Putin has frequently targeted. Yes, they’ve been admitted into NATO. But they have never been viewed as “core interests” of the United States. And for good reason. In fact, they were actually occupied by Moscow in 1944, as the Soviet military was fighting its way to Berlin during World War II, and turned into Soviet “republics” until the USSR disintegrated. Do any Americans genuinely believe that the tragedy unmistakably suffered by Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania ever affected America’s security or prosperity in the slightest?

My good friend, journalist and foreign policy analyst Leon Hadar, has just written compellingly in The National Interest that Trump’s Russia and overall foreign policy positions – however crudely and vaguely expressed – overlap with President Obama’s to a vastly underappreciated degree:

“[B]oth the liberal internationalist Obama and the conservative nationalist Trump are pragmatists and not ideologues by nature when it comes to foreign-policy issues. They both eventually gravitate towards choices based on cost-effectiveness calculations. The two have rejected the grand Wilsonian designs of promoting democracy and nation building pursued by George W. Bush under the influence of his neoconservative advisors, and believe that Washington needs to readjust its global strategy to the changing international balance of power and under the pressure of diminishing economic and military resources.”

The only problem with this theory is that precisely he is a liberal internationalist at heart, the president not only backs the basic structures of post-World War II U.S. foreign policy – the security alliances in Europe and Asia. He has both supported the aforementioned dangerous post-Cold War expansion of the former, and has ordered concrete measures to buttress them militarily.

But because, as Mr. Obama himself admits, America’s stake in the security of NATO’s newest members is anything but vital, it’s all too likely that the increased U.S. military presence in Eastern Europe could leave the nation in the worst of all possible circumstances – more deeply tied than ever to a military mission almost certain to fail,, and in all likelihood disastrously. (For somewhat different reasons, as I’ve contended most recently in this post, a similar argument can be made for America’s Asia policy under Mr. Obama.)

Trump, by contrast, is both spotlighting the risks created by U.S. alliances and similar policies and questioning the worth of these alliances and policies themselves. There’s a perfectly respectable argument to be made that Trump is wrong because the continuing nuclear commitments – and the U.S. forces deployed in harm’s way precisely in order to narrow America’s choices and ostensibly cow U.S. rivals – are protecting the allies at a risk to American territory that’s completely acceptable. But that’s not the argument being made by supporters of the foreign policy status quo – who also, perhaps not so coincidentally, never mention in public the nuclear dangers.

Instead, both the Democratic and Republican mainstays of the foreign policy establishment, and the Mainstream Media journalists who faithfully parrot their views, prefer to demonize Trump. And all of course in the name of “responsibility.”

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Kissinger’s (Unwitting?) Case for a Middle East Exit

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Bashir Al-Assad, energy, Henry Kissinger, Iran, Iran deal, ISIS, Middle East, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Shiites, Sunnis, Syria, terrorism, Vladimir Putin

I’m pretty sure that Henry Kissinger doesn’t view his latest op-ed column as an explanation of why the United States needs to refocus its Middle East strategy on the goal of strategic withdrawal. Nonetheless, that’s exactly what it is.

To his credit, the former Secretary of State acknowledges that U.S. policy is “on the verge of losing the ability to shape events” in the region. And the last quarter or so of his article presents what at first glance looks like a six-point plan for restoring American influence. The trouble is, it doesn’t add up to much of a strategy. To be sure, he does argue clearly for making ISIS’ defeat Washington’s top priority – to the point of of both dropping the aim of ousting Syrian dictator Bashir Al-Assad and even acquiescing in a Russian military role in the anti-terrorist campaign.

Kissinger’s arguments about Russia are especially interesting, diametrically opposed both to the prevailing Republican and conservative outrage over Vladimir Putin’s intervention, and also to the Obama administration’s weaker protests. In fact, Kissinger portrays Moscow’s involvement as mainly defensive (to prevent Islamic radicals from creating a base from which they could foment unrest among the large Muslim populations of Russia’s southern regions). Therefore, he contends that allowing the Russians to play a role in defeating ISIS is better than leaving the field open for “Iranian jihadist or imperial forces” to claim major credit for victory – and therefore will help contain Iran’s future influence.

The former Secretary also endorses President Obama’s policy of supplementing his Iran nuclear weapons agreement with “assurances” to help protect the region’s Sunni states, like Saudi Arabia, resist Tehran’s designs. But he also appears to agree with Mr. Obama that it’s worth trying to persuade the Iranians to stop destabilizing the region.

After that, though, the Kissinger approach gets pretty fuzzy: “The reconquered territories should be restored to the local Sunni rule that existed there before the disintegration of both Iraqi and Syrian sovereignty”? “The sovereign states of the Arabian Peninsula, as well as Egypt and Jordan, should play a principal role in that evolution”? “After the resolution of its constitutional crisis, Turkey could contribute creatively to such a process”? What on earth do those statement mean?

Ditto for “A federal structure could then be built between the Alawite and Sunni portions. If the Alawite regions become part of a Syrian federal system, a context will exist for the role of Mr. Assad, which reduces the risks of genocide or chaos leading to terrorist triumph.” Especially given Kissinger’s own (correct) judgment that a central challenge facing current U.S. Middle East policy is that “two rigid and apocalyptic blocs are confronting each other….”

In fact, the “Kissinger plan” dissolves into gauziness precisely because, as he makes so clear, that Sunni-Shiite conflict barely begins to describe the complexity and intractability of the region’s dysfunction. As he writes, the Middle East order that prevailed since 1973 “in shambles,” and four local states having literally fallen apart (Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen). Therefore, what’s left of the Sunni world (which includes America’s dubious allies, notably Saudi Arabia, “risks engulfment by four concurrent sources: Shiite-governed Iran and its legacy of Persian imperialism; ideologically and religiously radical movements striving to overthrow prevalent political structures; conflicts within each state between ethnic and religious groups arbitrarily assembled after World War I into (now collapsing) states; and domestic pressures stemming from detrimental political, social and economic domestic policies.”

More important, “The U.S. is now opposed to, or at odds in some way or another with, all parties in the region: with Egypt on human rights; with Saudi Arabia over Yemen; with each of the Syrian parties over different objectives. The U.S. proclaims the determination to remove Mr. Assad but has been unwilling to generate effective leverage—political or military—to achieve that aim. Nor has the U.S. put forward an alternative political structure to replace Mr. Assad should his departure somehow be realized.”

If he really is an archetypical realist, Kissinger should recognize that not all international problems are fated to be solved peacefully, and that geography has given the United States the priceless gift of distance from this hopeless mess. As I’ve repeatedly explained, because terrorist attacks remain all too possible, and because Middle East tumult continually endangers access to its energy supplies, America is not yet in a position simply to walk away. But as I’ve also repeatedly explained, the United States is eminently capable of addressing these issues predominantly through domestic policies like securing its borders better and stepping on the energy production revolution gas.

Henry Kissinger has all but accepted that the United States cannot become safe from Middle East dangers by manipulating the region’s players and societies. Indeed, moreover, his article, intriguingly, is titled, “A Path Out of the Middle East Collapse.” Is he still hoping against hope that the regional diplomatic circle can be squared?  Or do those first three words constitute his real message?  

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Obama’s (Way Too) Partial Victory on 60 Minutes

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60 Minutes, global leadership, internationalism, ISIS, Mainstream Media, national interests, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, Steve Kroft, Syria, Vladimir Putin

If you watched 60 Minutes Sunday, you know that President Obama had quite the verbal joust with CBS News reporter Steve Kroft about the crisis in Syria. If you care about scoring talking-point type hits, it seemed to me that Kroft came out on top. If you care about trying to explain to the American people why or whether they should care about this mess to begin with – which strikes me as a heck of a lot more important – Mr. Obama prevailed.

Not that his margin of victory was big – by a long shot. But at least the president briefly tried to focus the conversation on the paramount subject of advancing and protecting American interests, as opposed to Kroft’s preoccupation with treating the Syria conflict as a personal duel between the president and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. What’s frustrating is that this outburst of presidential common sense is an isolated incident, rather than part of a long pattern of statements aimed at keeping the nation focused on what it needs in foreign policy as opposed simply to what it wants. Moreover, Mr. Obama spent way too much time taking Kroft’s bait – trying to refute his premises instead of challenging them.

Kroft was entirely justified in calling attention to what are at least the terrible recent optics of U.S. policy toward Syria – and indeed, in the Middle East as a whole. After all, there is indeed a chasm between administration pronouncements on the region and what’s been happening on the ground. Further, Mr. Obama’s claim that Russia’s newest intervention in Syria reflects weakness rather than strength sounds especially unconvincing – and all the more so when juxtaposed with what looks like simple inaction from Washington.

Yet however wide and potentially damaging the resulting credibility gap – since perceptions can influence and in fact create diplomatic reality – that’s far from the main issue facing Americans in Syria. In fact, such problems only matter crucially if Americans and their leaders decide that Syria itself is intrinsically important to begin with, or that its fate will affect broader intrinsically important U.S. interests in the region as a whole.

So contrary to Kroft, it’s ultimately not particularly important in and of itself that the death toll in and refugee flow from Syria are rising or not; or whether the United States is succeeding or failing in destroying ISIS; or if Washington is making progress fast enough; or how much territory the terrorists control; or how dismally the president’s efforts to aid the moderate Syrian opposition have failed; or whether Russia is back militarily in the Middle East; or whether – as Kroft emphasized so dramatically – Putin is “challenging your leadership, Mr. President. He’s challenging your leadership-….”

What’s ultimately important, and justifies attention on the above developments, is identifying whether Syria’s fate can impact U.S. security and prosperity – and Kroft never sought the president’s views on whether it does, and if so, why.

As for Mr. Obama, he never proactively tried addressing this question. He spent much too much time insisting that the facts on the Middle East’s bloody ground are better than they look; that “Syria has been a difficult problem for the entire world community”; that military action alone won’t stabilize that country; that if you doubt that, look at the war in Afghanistan – which still hasn’t quelled the Taliban after 13 years – and that real leadership actually consists of fighting climate change, (temporarily) denying Iran a nuclear weapon, and assembling a broad anti-ISIS coalition.

It wasn’t until mid-way through this foreign policy segment that the president touched on what could have been a game-changing contention: “America’s priorities [have] to be number one, keeping the American people safe. Number two, we are prepared to work both diplomatically and where we can to support moderate opposition that can help convince the Russians and Iranians to put pressure on Assad for a transition.” A few minutes later, he elaborated a bit further: “[T]he problem that I think a lot of these critics never answered is what’s in the interest of the United States of America and at what point do we say that, ‘Here are the things we can do well to protect America. But here are the things that we also have to do in order to make sure that America leads and America is strong and stays number one.'”

Exactly – safeguarding U.S. national security and exercising American world leadership (however that’s defined) are two different missions, and the former doesn’t necessarily require the latter. In fact, that view would logically explain the president’s insistence that “we are not going to do is to try to reinsert ourselves in a military campaign inside of Syria.” It would just as logically explain his repeatedly stated, evident satisfaction with the goal of destroying ISIS “over time” (that is, once you recognize that the United States can fend off an ISIS threat to the homeland by keeping it too busy defending against attacks to plan, much less launch, September 11-like attacks).

Except Mr. Obama never made this or similar connections last night on 60 Minutes. Moreover, he’s never made them throughout his presidency. And he’s certainly never come close to taking the natural next step and articulating the advantages of replacing the current strategy (at least by default) of aiming to eliminate threats to the United States emanating from the Middle East by trying to manage or transform the region with one of countering these threats through domestic policies like fostering further progress on energy self-reliance and securing America’s borders.

What he’s done instead is talk in general, often abstract terms about the need to “degrade” terrorism, and about the imperative of reforming the Middle East by eradicating the alleged socio-economic roots of extremism, and about the importance of preventing the region’s political and broader dysfunction from worsening by relying on military force excessively, and using it ham-handedly.

Further, he doesn’t link these objectives to America’s safety and well-being in concrete and specific ways not because, as his domestic adversaries insist, he’s a radical or an apologist for America or a defeatist or a dreamer.  The president fails to make these links because he’s something quite different. He’s a card-carrying member – including a buy-in on the importance of “global leadership” – of the left wing of an American internationalist establishment that has long viewed as shamefully pedestrian, and unworthy of powers deserving the label “great,” foreign policies that aim first and foremost at keeping their countrymen (and women!) adequately secure and provided for.

What the 60 Minutes interview also makes clear, of course, is that Kroft – like most of the rest of the Mainstream Media – also enthusiastically endorses demonstrating national greatness through foreign policymaking. In other words, although the press is supposed to serve as democracy’s watchdog, its views of America’s world role are as remote from Main Street’s prime, and decidedly un-grandiose, concerns as those of the leaders it’s supposed to be holding accountable.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: An Economic Key to Meeting Putin’s Syria Challenge?

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airstrikes, Bashir Al-Assad, ISIS, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, Spanish Civil War, Syria, Vladimir Putin, War of Attrition, World War II

Although historical analogies are often whoppingly abused, the past crisis brought to my mind by Russia’s decision to launch airstrikes in Syria has nothing to do with the Middle East – and not even with the so-called 1969-1970 Israel-Egypt War of Attrition. That’s when Soviet pilots began flying combat patrols over Egypt to save its leaders from a humiliating defeat. Instead, the analogy that worries me is the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. This conflict quickly turned into a proxy war between the Europe’s democracies and its fascist dictators, and World War II broke out shortly after the latter prevailed.

The forces being mainly and possibly exclusively attacked by Moscow so far are not the ISIS terrorists that have been targeted by the U.S.-led coalition in Syria, but Syrian and other groups waging an American-backed revolt against Syrian dictator Bashir Al-Assad. So even though Washington’s support for the anti-Assad insurgents has been half-hearted, this Russian escalation clearly confronts President Obama with the prospect of defending these forces militarily, or suffering a hammer blow to whatever anti-ISIS and Middle East strategies he is pursuing, and to America’s global reputation. And even if the Russians wound up focusing on ISIS – in parallel with the American-dominated air campaign – the chances of friendly fire-type mishaps would be alarmingly high.

There are tempting arguments to be made for letting Vladimir Putin do the world’s dirty work in Syria, even if it leaves Assad in power. But they’re not arguments that Mr. Obama or his supporters can make, since the Syrian tyrant’s ouster has been a major goal of theirs for years. Much more important, the president’s hawkish critics also make valid points in warning that a Putin-Assad victory would greatly boost the influence of a Russian-Syrian-Iranian coalition in a region whose oil remains crucially important to the world economy. And although ISIS’ defeat would greatly reduce the terrorist threat the United States has faced from the Middle East’s Sunni Muslims, it’s entirely possible that Putin and his friends could empower Shiite replacements.

So it’s true that, as I’ve written, over the long run (really meaning “ASAP”), the best American approach to the Middle East is responding to the threats it generates with domestic policy measures. But it’s also true that even though U.S. dependence on Middle East oil – and in turn, the world’s, since global energy markets are so tightly integrated – is greatly reduced, the kinds of border security improvements needed to keep most terrorists out are nowhere in sight. So opting out of the Middle East, or a “Let Putin Do It” approach, simply aren’t safe enough options yet.

Putin indeed might back down if the United States follows through its vow to continue its own airstrikes whether or not they bring American jets dangerously close to Russian craft. But that’s only a possibility, and one fraught with peril. Economics may offer a better option, in one of two ways.

First, the West could at least decisively strengthen the message sent by continued sorties over Syria, and thus get the Russians out of its skies sooner rather than later, by threatening to impose truly sweeping sanctions on Moscow.

Some international business ties have been cut off in response to Putin’s muscle-flexing in Crimea and Ukraine, and Russia’s economy has been hurt, but the pain clearly has been manageable. Moreover, the sanctions’ failure to change Russian behavior so far stems no doubt not only from their limited scope, but from Putin’s clear, and seemingly sensible, confidence that the Europeans, whose own economies have been weak, are eager to restore unfettered commerce – or at least are determined not to escalate sanctions unless absolutely necessary. But if the Europeans are as angered by Putin’s latest moves as they sound, here’s their chance to show it. And here’s Washington’s chance to find out just how reliable an ally Europe will be.

But there’s another sanctions-related strategy worth considering: a Western promise to end the sanctions if Putin agrees to abandon Assad and cooperate actively and comprehensively with the U.S.-led campaign to destroy ISIS. The result would be a de facto Western acceptance of Russian domination of neighboring Ukraine – surely Putin’s top current strategic priority – in exchange for the Russian leader (temporarily?) dropping his ambitions to be a dominant player in the much further away Middle East. In the process, Putin also gets to help counter Islamic terrorism, a continuing threat in those Russian regions with big Muslim populations.

This bargain should serve Western interests, too, since however regrettable Ukraine’s likely fate is, its importance to U.S. and European security is dwarfed by the need to defeat ISIS. And victory in Syria could start easing the refugee crisis with which Europe is struggling to cope.

But whether the prospect of much greater economic losses is enough to end Russia’s military intervention, or whether the prospect of ended sanctions accomplishes the goal, economics seems to have considerable potential for defusing a genuinely scary Syria situation. The Europeans’ cooperation certainly can’t be assumed – especially for sanctions escalation. But here’s hoping that, although there’s no evidence for diplomatic creativity in Washington, President Obama is at least exploring such proposals.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Desperately Seeking Real Retrenchment

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Afghanistan, American exceptionalism, Asia-Pacific, Baltic states, Bashir Al-Assad, boots on the ground, Charles Lanes, chemical weapons, defense budget, defense spending, Earl Ravenal, George W. Bush, international law, Iraq, ISIS, isolationism, Middle East, multilateralism, national interests, NATO, Nixon Doctrine, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, pivot, Poland, Richard Nixon, Russia, sequestration, Soviet Union, Stephen Sestanovich, Syria, Ukraine, Vietnam War, vital interests, Vladimir Putin, Washington Post

Washington Post columnist Charles Lane has just done an excellent job of demonstrating how powerfully universalist America’s bipartisan foreign policy establishment remains – even as powerful reasons keep multiplying for climbing down from this wildly ambitious approach.

According to Lane, a new book by former American diplomat and Columbia University political scientist Stephen Sestanovich bears out President Obama’s claim to be a kindred spirit with Richard M. Nixon as a “retrenchment” president – one of the chief executives who has sought to “correct the perceived overreaching of their predecessors and free up U.S. resources for domestic concerns.” In fact, says Lane, Sestanovich has written that post-World War II U.S. foreign policy has been marked by a “constant pendulum-swing between administrations that aggressively pursued U.S. goals abroad” (who the author calls “maximalists”) and those Nixon- and Obama-style retrenchers.

I hate to comment on books I haven’t yet read. But Lane’s description of Mr. Nixon and Mr. Obama both qualify as retrenchers reveals a mindset so enthusiastic about massive and potentially open-ended U.S. involvement in literally every corner of the world if necessary that it sees even talk about a more discriminating approach as a major departure.

Judging by the record, it hasn’t been. In fact, both the Nixon talk and the Obama talk about retrenchment have been overwhelmingly that – talk. Just as important, and closely related, what have arguably looked at least superficially like exercises in retrenchment have in fact been exercises in wishful thinking. Both presidents have actually agreed that the security, stability, and even prosperity of the entire world are U.S. vital interests. They’ve simply differed with the maximalists in insisting that these interests can be defended through means that are less dangerous and violent, and more globally popular, than the unilateral U.S. use of military force.

To cite the leading historical example, the ballyhooed Nixon Doctrine of 1970 was never a decision to cross Vietnam or any part of Asia off the list of vital U.S. interests – those whose defense was thought essential for maintaining America’s own security and prosperity. As explained initially by Earl C. Ravenal shortly after the Doctrine’s declaration, Mr. Nixon had decided, in the absence of any evidence, that this vital set of objectives could be defended without an early resort to U.S. military involvement – chiefly, by the militaries of America’s regional allies.

Therefore, Ravenal wrote:

“the Administration’s new policies and decision processes do not bring about the proposed balance [between the country’s foreign policy ends and the means to be used to attain them]; in fact, they create a more serious imbalance. Essentially we are to support the same level of potential involvement with smaller conventional forces. The specter of intervention will remain, but the risk of defeat or stalemate will be greater; or the nuclear threshold will be lower.”

President Obama has given us a different version of such dangerous wishful thinking. More accurately, he’s given us several different versions. His original 2008 candidacy for the White House was largely motivated by a conviction that the overly unilateralist and militaristic tendencies of George W. Bush had produced disaster in Iraq, and were actually undermining U.S. security by damaging America’s international image.

That’s why Mr. Obama focused so much attention on repairing that image. He never indicated that he would scale back that list of U.S. vital interests. He simply suggested that they could be better defended if need be by acting multilaterally, with international approval, rather than by going it alone. And he conveyed the clear impression that challenges could be prevented in the first place if only America became more popular in regions like the Middle East.

Once in office, Mr. Obama did try to establish a hierarchy of U.S. worldwide interests that would have operational impact. He decided that the nation had been so preoccupied with Middle East wars that it had been neglected the Asia-Pacific region, which he considered at least as important. So he launched a “pivot” that would transfer some American forces from the former to the latter.

But the president never apparently judged the Middle East to be less important to America’s fate. He simply concluded that, with the Afghanistan and Iraq wars supposedly winding down, it had become less dangerous. Having been proven wrong by the rise of ISIS. in Afghanistan, he’s (gradually) boosting the American military presence in region again. The president is claiming, moreover – based on as little evidence as Mr. Nixon required – that any remaining capabilities gap can be filled by the armed forces of regional countries. Worse, many of his Republican critics, who are just as reluctant to deploy many more U.S. “boots on the ground,” agree with Mr. Obama’s fundamental assessment.

Further, the president has actually expanded the list of circumstances in the Middle East (and presumably elsewhere) that should justify American military responses – the kinds of chemical weapons attacks launched by Bashir Al-Assad against Syrians revolting against his dictatorship, along with similar major violations of international law.  (This effort, so far, has not yet won over the public.)

Nor does that exhaust Mr. Obama’s efforts to lengthen the list of U.S. vital interests. He has understandably responded to Russia’s recent provocations against allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) by strengthening U.S. forces and deploying them more conspicuously in new NATO members like Poland and the Baltic states, former Soviet satellites clearly in Moscow’s line of fire. Less understandable have been the Obama administration’s numerous suggestions that the security of Ukraine, too, is a matter of urgent American concern – even though this country was actually part of the old Soviet Union for decades with no apparent effects on U.S. safety or well-being.

Yet like the debate over countering ISIS, that over dealing with Vladimir Putin spotlights one major difference between President Obama and his (mainly) Republican foreign policy critics: Many of them have strongly backed big boosts in the U.S. military budget (if not always using these forces), including aggressive moves to circumvent spending caps established by the sequestration process. Mr. Obama has not sought comparable increases.

The president unquestionably has often spoken in terms that seem to support a smaller U.S. role in the world – e.g., his remarks suggesting that America’s exceptionalism isn’t all that exceptional, and reminding that much of the world has legitimate historical grievances against the West, and in some cases against the United States specifically. But his strategic walk has never matched this talk, and the continuing flood of contentions to the contrary in the punditocracy and even academe (if Lane’s Post column is accurate) plainly are serving their (partly) intended purpose of preventing searching debate on foreign policy fundamentals.

Given the nation’s resulting over-extension militarily, therefore, when the chattering class powers-that-be start labeling presidents or most other politicians as retrenchers or minimalists (an improvement to be sure over the hackneyed charge of “isolatonism”), the only legitimate reaction is a thoroughly exasperated, “If only.”