Trump foreign policy and the strategic position of the US

Alfred McCoy takes a snapshot of US foreign policy after a year of Donald Trump as President with a Secretary of State committed to a systematic dismantling of his own department in The World According to Trump TomDispatch 01/16/2018:

... American leaders have been on top of the world for so long that they no longer remember how they got there. Few among Washington’s foreign policy elite seem to fully grasp the complex system that made U.S. global power what it now is, particularly its all-important geopolitical foundations. As Trump travels the globe, tweeting and trashing away, he’s inadvertently showing us the essential structure of that power, the same way a devastating wildfire leaves the steel beams of a ruined building standing starkly above the smoking rubble.

The architecture of the world order that Washington built after World War II was not only formidable but, as Trump is teaching us almost daily, surprisingly fragile. At its core, that global system rested upon a delicate duality: an idealistic community of sovereign nations equal under the rule of international law joined tensely, even tenuously, to an American imperium grounded in the realpolitik of its military and economic power.

And he suggests that we could "think of this duality as the State Department versus the Pentagon."

In a real sense, US power has been on the decline since the end of the Second World War. The US ended the war in overall great shape, militarily and economically, despite the large number of American lives lost in the war. The USSR was also victorious and constituted a major opposing pole of political orientation and a fundamentally different economic system. But it has also been devastated in the war.

And the "bipolar" confrontation between the two systems continued to reduce the relative strength of the United States, especially after the victory of the Chinese Revolution in 1949.

Adherents of the "realist" perspective in foreign policy argue that among nations there is a continuing shifting in balances of power, with each nation calculating its moves based on its own national self-interest. Self-interest isn't a constant factor, nor a simple one, nor one that is independent of the judgments and ideologies of the decision-makers. But some things, like an adversary power building up military bases on the border, are elements that any decision-maker about foreign policy in a country would regard as a potentially threatening factor that had to be taken into full account.

The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union increased the relative strength of the US in the world system, because its largest competitor for world power had exited the historical stage. This gave rise to a triumphal attitude by American policymakers and politicians and, in the tendency that the realists recognized, led to arrogant and incautious actions. Prior to his death in 2005, the leading realist thinker, George Kennan, was warning that expanding NATO closer and closer to Russian borders would lead to offsetting reactions by Russia.

Ebbs and flows of influence will continue. But the longterm trend of US power and influence has been in decline since the end of World War II. That's not good or bad in itself. The British Empire fell apart after the Second World War, but Britain itself has remained one of the richest countries in the world and has basically only been involved in wars by its own choice, e.g., the Iraq War, the Libyan intervention. There are costs of various kinds to trying to maintain overwhelming military dominance in all parts of the world. Not least of which is the damage to democratic institutions and personal freedoms in the United States that comes from a condition of permanent war.

But it's one thing to pull back from overly costly or excessively risky commitments in other countries, military and otherwise. It's another to just blunder along without coherent or sensible political leadership McCoy:

If all great empires require skilled leadership at their epicenter to maintain what is always a fragile global equilibrium, then the Trump administration has failed spectacularly. As the State Department is eviscerated and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson discredited, Trump has -- uniquely for an American president -- taken sole control of foreign policy (with the generals he appointed to key civilian posts in tow).

McCoy gives this impressive list of examples of shifts occurring due to Trump's nationalistic "American First" policies:

All you have to do is note headlines in the daily media over the past year to grasp that Washington’s world dominion is crumbling, thanks to the sorts of cascading setbacks that often accompany imperial decline. Consider the first seven days of December, when the New York Times reported (without connecting the dots) that nation after nation was pulling away from Washington. First, there was Egypt, a country which had received $70 billion in U.S. aid over the previous 40 years and was now opening its military bases to Russian jet fighters; then, despite President Obama’s assiduous courtship of the country, Myanmar was evidently moving ever closer to Beijing; meanwhile, Australia, America’s stalwart ally for the last 100 years, was reported to be adapting its diplomacy, however reluctantly, to accommodate China’s increasingly dominant power in Asia; and finally, there was the foreign minister of Germany, that American bastion in Europe since 1945, pointing oh-so-publicly to a widening divide with Washington on key policy issues and insisting that clashes will be inevitable and relations “will never be the same.”

And that’s just to scratch the surface of one week’s news without even touching on the kinds of ruptures with allies regularly being ignited or emphasized by the president’s daily tweets. Just three examples from many will do: President Peña Nieto’s cancelation of a state visit after a tweet that Mexico had to pay for Trump’s prospective “big, fat, beautiful wall” on the border between the two countries; outrage from British leaders sparked by the president’s retweet of racist anti-Muslim videos posted on a Twitter account by the deputy leader of a neo-Nazi political group in that country, followed by his rebuke of British Prime Minister Theresa May for criticizing him over it; or his New Year’s Day blast accusing Pakistan of “nothing but lies & deceit” as a prelude to cutting off U.S. aid to that country. Considering all the diplomatic damage, you could say that Trump is tweeting while Rome burns.

Like many accounts of Trump's diplomacy, McCoy also points to the pullback from trade treaties like TPP also represents a ceding of diplomatic and strategic advantage to others, especially China in the case of TPP.

You don't have to think that TPP style "trade" treaties, which are primarily corporate deregulation treaties that have become an important tool to lock in Herbert Hooverish neoliberal economic policies, are good in themselves to also recognize that Trump's approach has been a one-sided yielding of diplmatic and strategic power. A more progressive approach to trade treaties would have the potential to restore some of that influence but on a basis that would benefit ordinary people more substantially. Obviously, that's not the approach Trump is taking.

Neocon bigwig Robert Kagan Kaplan on the virtues of war and chaos

Robert Kaplan, one of the leading neocons has a new think piece out, America Is Fated to Lead The National Interest 12/22/2014 (Jan-Feb 2015 issue).

Two points are especially worth notice.

One is that Kaplan justifies the neocons' much-desired and very disastrous war in Iraq with the argument that, hey, so we left chaos behind, so what? It's the fault of fate, or God, or something.

The second is a related rhetorical move, to declare it realism to not worry to too much about the fact that wars one advocates turns out to be disasters. In other words, it's perfectly fine to go on advocating war and killing without regard to the high possibility of bad outcomes.

This following paragraph sounds almost regretful. But it follows one that blames the whole mess on inadequate administration of the occupation by the Cheney-Bush Administration. Conservatism - including neoconservatism - can never fail, it can only be failed, as Digby likes to say.

I supported the Iraq War. I mention this whenever publicly discussing the issue. I was not in favor of exporting democracy. Anyone who knows my work knows that I have seen the benefits of enlightened dictatorship in many instances, and still do. But Saddam Hussein’s regime was not a dictatorship: it constituted a suffocating totalitarianism somewhere south of Stalin and north of the Assads in Syria. I knew it intimately from several reporting trips to Iraq in the 1980s, and thus I was a journalist who had gotten too close to his story. In short, I became committed. Yet, no matter how Iraq turns out in the future, even if there is a sharp improvement and the Islamic State is defeated, the price America paid there will still have been far too steep. The war as it turned out—not how it might have turned out according to some counterfactual — was a disaster.

Fate comes in here:

... there may never have been even the possibility of a soft landing for the Baathist regimes in the Levant [Iraq and Syria], given how much these regimes pulverized society, eviscerating all forms of intermediary social organizations except for the state at the top and the tribe and extended family at the bottom. Whether we acted militarily or not, in Iraq or in Syria, the result in any event was going to be anarchy. This is fatalism, I know. It denies human agency — and, therefore, moral responsibility on our part. But while that might be reprehensible, it does not necessarily make my assertion false. [my emphasis]

Do I need to say that anyone with a reasonably decent conscience would think that if the result was going to be the same either way that it was horribly immoral to initiate a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq and turned millions into refugees?

So, Kaplan in this essay expresses his admiration for "the benefits of enlightened dictatorship" and his contempt for the idea of promoting democracy with the wars he advocates. And says that this mysterious Fate of which he speaks exempts him and other war advocates from "moral responsibility on our part."

His manipulation of the concept of foreign policy realism involves a peculiar reading of the Nixon Administration's decision to establish a new relationship with China as part of a way to exploit the Sino-Soviet split. This was an important moment in US foreign policy, not least because the dogmatic policy that the US had pursued since the victory of the Chinese Communists and establishment of the People's Republic in 1949 had been particularly brainless, driven by ideology, ignorance and fringy rightwing politics.

Kagan's conclusion: "Thus does an amoral strategy, in the service of a naked national interest, have a moral result."

I read this odd string of arguments as a pitch for the idea that it doesn't matter that we pursue an immoral and/or illegal policy, it's okay because it make work out for the best. And if it doesn't, it's because of Fate, and the bad result would have happened anyway.

It's also notable that Kaplan fills his essay with seemingly scholarly references, that don't really amount to much more than name-dropping in the middle of his sloganeering: Dean Acheson, conservative Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, conservative French philosopher Raymond Aron, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin, Bernard DeVoto, Patrick Leigh Fermor, historian Orlando Figes, Herodotus, Samuel "Clash of Civilizations" Huntington, famous foreign policy Realist George Kennan, neocon heavyweight Jeane Kirkpatrick, unindicted war criminal Henry Kissinger, and William Shakespeare.

He adds in various historical references and some geographical blather about America's "navigable inland waterways" and such to promote his ideas about Fate.

Kaplan's praise of historian and literary critic Bernard DeVoto strike me as odd. Kaplan describes him as "my personal hero, a once-celebrated literary figure now forgotten." I haven't forgotten him. I still periodically consult one of his three books on my bookshelf for this or that about the history of the American West.

Based on those books, and on DeVoto's liberal interventionist inclinations prior to Pearl Harbor - inclinations widely shared by Democrats at the time - Kaplan writes, "he saw the good in Manifest Destiny before generations of academics would see nothing but evil in it. Yet he also understood — perhaps at a more profound level than anyone else, before or since — that the blessings of geographical fate had freighted America with global responsibilities." And he draws the conclusion, that I doubt DeVoto himself ever would have stated this way, "If you haven’t internalized moments like the California gold rush and westward expansion, you can’t fully grasp why America deserves to lead." (emphasis in original)

DeVoto's patriotism and admiration of the historical accomplishments in American history certainly didn't prevent him from describing the antiwar attitude of Emerson and Thoreau toward the Mexican War and that complexity of that conflict, a major chapter in the story of US westward expansion. His jaundiced description of the President James Polk's leadership in that war is particularly memorable. (See DeVoto's The Year of Decision, 1846; published 1943).

American triumphalism in the 1990s

James Carden and Jacob Heilbrunn give an account of the Washington Post's editorial policy in The Washington Post: The Most Reckless Editorial Page in America The National Interest 12/15/2014.

In the process, they give an interesting account of the development of post-Cold War triumphalism during the Clinton Administration:

During the 1990s, the belief in promoting democratization abroad was widespread. It was supposed to be America’s “unipolar moment,” a term coined by Krauthammer. It bestrode, or came to see itself as bestriding, the world as a colossus. Journalists such as Thomas Friedman enskied globalization: it would usher in nothing less than a new era of peace and prosperity for all. No two countries that each had a McDonald’s, we were told, would fight one another. Intent on burnishing his foreign-policy credentials, Governor Bill Clinton eagerly espoused the virtues of globalization and American power. In his “New Covenant for American Security” address at Georgetown University in 1991, for example, Clinton recalled that at the dawn of the Cold War, the United States had to

find ways to rebuild the economies of Europe and Asia, encourage a worldwide movement toward independence, and vindicate our nation’s principles in the world against yet another totalitarian challenge to liberal democracy. Thanks to the unstinting courage and sacrifice of the American people, we were able to win that Cold War.

Clinton was by no means alone in his conviction that American leadership would inexorably lead to an interdependent world. Though obviously the most prominent, he was but one of a number of liberal Democrats, such as Time magazine foreign-affairs columnist Strobe Talbott, who had viewed the Cold War—and above all, Ronald Reagan—with suspicion, if not hostility, but now retroactively professed that nothing other than American resolve had brought the decades-long drama to a peaceful denouement. [my emphasis]

And the following gives some good background perspective on how the liberal interventionists of the 1990s have no come to be hard to distinguish from warmongering neoconservatives:

In Clinton’s words, “In a world where freedom, not tyranny, is on the march, the cynical calculus of pure power politics simply does not compute. It is ill-suited to a new era.” Just how seductive this way of looking at the world was (and remains) to large swathes of the liberal political establishment became even clearer in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. As the late Tony Judt wrote, “The ‘Clinton generation’ of American liberal intellectuals take special pride in their ‘tough-mindedness’ [and display] an exuberant enthusiasm for violent political transformations at other people’s expense. ... The use value of such persons to ambitious radical regimes is an old story.” [my emphasis]

That notion that "the cynical calculus of pure power politics" is something that invites recklessness in foreign policy. We've seen that in the last year in the debates over Ukraine policy the notion that realist calculations about Russia's intentions, abilities and judgments should somehow be dismissed in favor of purist posturing about democracy and national sovereignty without regard to the consequences of open-ended escalation.

What lies behind much of that attitude is what Carden and Heilbrunn describes of the 1990s liberal interventionists but which applies to the neocons, as well: "Washington, they assumed, could more or less do what it wanted, whenever and wherever it chose." That was the American "cynical calculus of pure power politics" that lay behind the attitude that we could ignore such considerations on the part of others.

We're now seeing the consequences of that arrogant assumption. The chances for for a more peaceful and just international order were largely squandered. Washington is not all-powerful on the downside, either, of course. Other countries and international actors make their own decisions, as well, which have their own influences on the world's chances.

And Ukraine is yet another place where the evangelism of American power and purity has recently encountered some rough going.