Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies analysing Trump's strange, nationalistic, belligerant speech at the United Nations on Tuesday, Trump's 'Dissociation from Reality' at UNThe Real News 09/25/2018:
Abby Bard of the Center for American Progress characterizes the speech in this way, which is consistent with my impression, in Trump's UN Speech Hurts America and the International System The National Interest 09/26/2018:
The speech sounded as if it could have been given by a dictator who wanted the world to know why other countries had no business interfering in their country’s repressive domestic policies and bore a striking resemblance to China’s “non-interference” policy. It’s particularly ironic and deeply disturbing that Trump has couched his speech in the language of equity and diversity given his promotion of white supremacist talking points and use of racist language against immigrants.
She also notes that Trump's "theory of sovereignty only appears to extend into the humanitarian realm."
But she also notes in relation to Trump's verbal attacks on Venezuela, include humanitarian concerns, that it seems forTrump, "human rights only matter when there is an economic gain for the United States."
Historian Andrew Bacevich has a Niebuhrian view of public policy that gives his writing a sense of tragedy mixed with cautious hope.
In After Trump: The Donald in the Rearview MirrorTomDispatch 09/11/2018, he looks at the continuities of the Trump Era with its predecessors, seeing Trump in his way as being a normal product of the preceeding political and economic trajectory of the United States.
He does not mean it as a compliment.
Looking back to the immediate postwar area, which in retrospect we call the beginning of the Golden Age of Capitalism these days, Bacevich notes three "large facts" that defined the US reality: the gigantic industrial role of the country in the world economy; a relatively egalitarian distribution of wealth and income (he actually calls it the distribution of "the benefits" of the economy); and, a broad pacifist sentiment.
The latter sounds especially surprising in 2018. But after the end of the Second World War, there really was a big hope and expectation from the American public that we needed peace and should try to avoid becoming involved in new wars. There was a big public demand to bring US troops home from abroad, to President Harry Truman's consternation. As Bacevich describes it, Americans "may not have been a peace-loving people, but they knew enough about war to see it as a great evil." Recogniying that war in itself is a great evil is the most appealing aspect of Niebuhrian realism.
But those three "large facts" of the postwar America are part of the past. The US is no longer the industrial powerhouse of the world in anything like the way it was in 1946. "Ours is increasingly a 'gig' economy," Bacevich writes, "which might be cool enough when you’re 25, but less so when you’re in your sixties and wondering if you’ll ever be able to retire."
Wealth and income distribution, of course, are radically more unequal today than in the postwar period. Republican Administrations promoted that outcome with deregulation and tax cuts slanted for the wealthy. So did the Democrats, if not quite so recklessly.
And, of course, today the government and the political parties and many ordinary citizens, too, accept constant war as normal rather than viewing war as a terrible though sometimes unavoidable evil:
By 2016, Americans had also come to accept war as normal. Here was “global leadership” made manifest. So U.S. troops were now always out there somewhere fighting, however obscure the purpose of their exertions and however dim their prospects of achieving anything approximating victory. The 99% of Americans who were not soldiers learned to tune out those wars, content merely to “support the troops,” an obligation fulfilled by offering periodic expressions of reverence on public occasions. Thank you for your service!
Bacevich developed that latter theme at length in his book, The New American Militarism (2005). And the trend wasn't interrupted by the Obama or Trump Administration.
Bacevich's Nieburhian perspective keeps in view the fallen state of humanity and the fragility of good intentions, particulary in foreign policy. This sometimes lends a fatalistic tone to his writing that makes me wish he would get a dose of Hegelian optimism. But he's not being cynical when he writes things like:
By the twenty-first century, the values that Trump embodies had become as thoroughly and authentically American as any of those specified in the oracular pronouncements of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, or Franklin Roosevelt. Trump’s critics may see him as an abomination. But he is also one of us.
Yet as his article also makes clear, he is highly critical of Trump and very aware of his particular obnoxious traits. What he says about Trump's supposed "isolationism" in foreign policy is on point.
At the same time, he is emphasizing that there are deeper problems whose solutions depend on an activated citizenry. I don't know if that's Hegelian so much as Jeffersonian, but he is making a call for ordinary voters to be more engaged and to take on their responsibilities in a democracy:
The nation’s too-little, too-late response to climate change for which a succession of presidents share responsibility illustrates the great and abiding defect of contemporary American politics. When all is said and done, presidents don’t shape the country; the country shapes the presidency -- or at least it defines the parameters within which presidents operate. Over the course of the last few decades, those parameters have become increasingly at odds with the collective wellbeing of the American people, not to mention of the planet as a whole. ...
Trump is not the problem. Think of him instead as a summons to address the real problem, which in a nation ostensibly of, by, and for the people is the collective responsibility of the people themselves. For Americans to shirk that responsibility further will almost surely pave the way for more Trumps -- or someone worse -- to come. [my emphasis]
Even Foreign Affairs apparently can't resist a bit of both-sides-do-it-ism when it comes to Trump's foreign policy. The latest issue (97:133; 2018) has a piece by political scientist Randall Schweller, "Three Cheers for Trump's Foreign Policy: What the Establishment Misses." It's about as enthusiastic a praise for Trump's policies as you're likely to find this side of Rudy Giulani.
And totally superficial. He writes that Trump's "worldview is fundamentally realist in nature." This about a guy who is a serial fabulist.
Schweller also seems to be completely clueless as to even the basics of how the US trade deficit works.
I guess it's useful in that its probably a more coherent statement of praise for Trump's foreign policy than we're likely to see out of the White House. Certainly not from Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
At least he doesn't talk about the Deep State. Instead he talks about "the Blob".
I think their standards at Foreign Affairs may be slipping a bit. Fun fact: Foreign Affairs first published 1910-1919 as The Journal of Race Development.
This tweet by Michael Toomey also works for me:
As soon as I thought about who would write something like this and get it published in Foreign Affairs, I clicked on the article and had my suspicions confirmed. Randall Schweller never fails to disappoint.
The issue also contains a piece by one-time End of History theorist Francis Fukayama, "Against Identity Politics: The New Tribalism and the Crisis of Democracy." It reads like it was phoned in. But it's a weighty piece compared to Schweller's Trumpist true-believer screed.
Fukayama's article is actually a highbrow piece of liberal concern trolling. With the requisite complaining about how Mean Libruls pushed all this here political correctness stuff and thereby created the Trump white nationalist movement. Also strangers-in-their-own-land sympathies for the white working-class voters who feel ignored by the Mean Libruls and it really hurts their feelings.
Until recently, activists on the left had little to say about the burgeoning opioid crisis or the fate of children growing up in impoverished single-parent families in the rural United States. And the Democrats have put forward no ambitious strategies to deal with the potentially immense job losses that will accompany advancing automation or the income disparities that technology may bring to all Americans.
Both of which can scarcely be addressed with Republican free-market extremism. But Fukayama spins it as a unique problem for the Democrats.
The Mean Libruls are to blame, you see.
Someone should really explain to poor Fukayama that white backlash against minorities, progress, and good manners has been going on since approximately the day of Marse Lee's surrender at Appomattox.
History may have resumed. But Fukayama doesn't seem to have lost his faith in the endless virtues of neoliberal economics.
Other nations around the world are obviously faced with making significant adjustments in their foreign policy in response to the new orientations and the high level of uncertainty in the Trump Administration's foreign policy.
Christoph Schult writes about German moves in "Allianz der Gleichgesinnten," Der Spiegel 28.07.2018. He takes as a starting point a meeting that German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas (SPD) had with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe. Haas, writes Schult, proposed to Abe:
... stellt Maas dem japanischen Regierungschef seine Idee eines neuen Staatenbundnisses vor. Sie konnte das weltpolitische Vakuum fallen, das Trump hinterlässt. In den kommenden Monaten soll ein Netzwerk global orientierter Staaten geknüpft werden, das sich in der Außen-, Handels- und Klimapolitik eng abstimmt. »Wir brauchen eine Allianz der Multilateralisten«, sagt Maas, ein Bündnis also, das für jene globalen Regeln und Strukturen der Nachkriegsordnung eintritt, die Trump ablehnt. >»Der Klügere gibt nach< ware in diesen Zeiten die falsche Maxime«, sagt Maas.
{ ... his idea of a new alliances of states. It could fill the political vacuum that Trump has left. In coming months, a network of globally oriented countries that agree with each other in foreign, trade, and climate politicies will be liked together. "We need an alliance of mulitilateralists," say Maas. Meaning an alliance that will engage for the global rules and structures of the postwar [post Second World War] order that Trump rejects. "'The cleverer give in', would be the wrong maxim in these times," says Maas.}
Trump's recent statements represented a turning point, in Schult's reporting:
Spätestens seitdem der US-Präsident den Nato-Partnern beim Brüsseler Gipfel mit dem Rückzug aus der westlichen Verteidigungsallianz gedroht und wenige Tage später die EU als »Gegner« bezeichnet hat, hat sich in Berlin, Brüssel und Paris die Hoffnung zerschlagen, dass Allianzen Trump überhaupt etwas bedeuten. Die USA hatten sich vom »Ordnungsgeber« zum »Ordnungszerstorer« gewandelt, heißt es in der Bundesregierung.
{At least since the US President threatened the NATO partners at the Brussels summit that he would withdraw from the Western defence alliance and a few days later described the EU as an "enemy," hope has been destroyed in Berlin, Brussels, and Paris that alliances mean anything at all to Trump. The US has changed from being a "provider of order" to a "destroyer of order," say people in the German government.} [my emphasis]
This article reads very much like a trial balloon floated intentionally by government officials, not so much like actual investigative reporting. That's how the press works. But it's another public indication that EU and NATO governments are moving to protect themselves from Trump's European policy, which - intentionally or not - is very much in line with the efforts of Vladimir Putin's Russia to undermine both NATO and the EU.
Schult's piece mentions several countries that the German government considers possibly important partners in this effort: Canada, Mexico, France, South Africa, Australia, and Argentina. It's strikes me that Canada and Mexico have a strong national interest in taking some part in this effort. Martin Hesse writes elsewhere in the same Spiegel ("America first, Dollar second") notes that Trump's currency policy (or just blundering actions) could destablize the world financial system. So countries all over the world have reason to be carefully considering options.
Also in the same issue, Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen gives a suggestion that a sort of stalling for time is also part of the Merkel government's perspective:
Diese Fixierung begleitet ihn ja schon über Jahrzehnte. Lange bevor er Präsident war, hat er bereits über deutsche Autos und deutsche Exporte gesprochen. Seine oft abfällige Art gegenüber Deutschland ist aber alles andere als typisch amerikanisch. Ich war bei meiner letzten US-Reise im Abgeordnetenhaus und im Senat und habe erfahren, mit welcher Leidenschaft sich die Amerikaner über Parteigrenzen hinweg zur Nato bekennen und wie sehr ihnen an der deutschamerikanischen Freundschaft liegt, die für viele nicht nur schone Erinnerung ist, sondern vor allem ein wichtiges Element der Zukunft unserer freien und toleranten Gesellschaften.
{This fixation [on Germany as an antogonist] is something that [Trump] has held for decades. Long before he was President, he had already spoke about German cars and German exports. But his often disparaging manner toward Germany is anything but typically American. On my last trip to the US, I was in the House of Representative and in the Senate and experienced with what passion the Americans across party lines recognized NATO and how much they valued the German-American friendship, which for many is not only a beautiful memory, but above all an important element of the future of our free and tolerant societies.}
She mentions that in those meeting with the Members of Congress, they made a point of recalling that Germany was the country that took the lead in formally invoking the NATO alliance over the 9/11 attacks and in support of the Afghanistan War.
She also has this to say about Russia's current position toward Europe:
Helsinki hat wieder gezeigt, dass Russlands Präsident Putin eine klare Strategie hat. Seine wirtschaftliche Schwache will er dadurch überspielen, dass er sich als globaler Player positioniert. Ein Mittel dafür ist auch, den Konsens der Atlantischen Demokratien, die Nato und die EU zu spalten. Eine klare Strategie des amerikanischen Präsidenten im Umgang mit Russland ist nach dem Treffen indes nicht zu erkennen.
{Helsinki [the Trump-Putin meeting] showed again that Russia's President Putin has a clear strategy. He wants to gloss over its economic weakness by positioning himself as a global player. One means for that is to try to split the consensus of the Atlantic democracies, the NATO and the EU. A clear strategy on the part of the American President in dealing with Russia, however, is still not apparent after the meeting.}
Von der Leyen also notes that Germany gets 9% of its energy from Russia. Considerably less than the 70% Trump claimed in one of his endless tweets.
All the talk about the 2% spending target for NATO countries, and now Trump's my-4%-is-bigger-than-your-2% nonsense, is beginning to get to me. Ewen MacAskill and Pippa Crerar report (Donald Trump tells Nato allies to spend 4% of GDP on defenceGuardian 07/11/2018):
Trump left the assembled presidents and prime ministers [at the NATO summit] floundering, unsure whether he was serious about the 4% target, double the existing Nato target of 2%, which many do not meet, or whether it was just a ploy.
After making the announcement, Trump walked out.
The White House press secretary, Sarah Sanders, confirmed the 4% figure. “During the president’s remarks today at the Nato summit he suggested that countries not only meet their commitment of 2% of their GDP on defence spending, but that they increase it to 4%,” she said.
A percentage of GDP target for defense spending is an entirely arbitrary number. What counts is whether the defense budget is appropriate to a foreign policy that takes into account realistic security risks. And also how well the money is spent. A country with a smaller GDP like Greece - and one that has shrunk incredibly due to the EU's austerity policies - may need to spend more than 2%, but countries like Germany and France maybe less. Greece actually is spending more than 2% now.
Markus Becker in Gerade noch mal gut gegangenSpiegel Online 12.07.2018 gives the following percentages for the five NATO countries that currently spend more than 2% of GDP on defense:
This is the total percentage for the US, not a percentage spent only on European defense.
Über-Realist Stephen Walt in The EU and NATO and Trump — Oh My!Foreign Policy 07/02/2018 refers to the painfully obvious point that "Trump’s evident distaste for these institutions [NATO AND G-7] mostly reveals his own ignorance and lack of strategic acumen." That's actually putting it generally.
Walt is actually being generous in putting it that way. A desire to join in Vladimir Putin's foreign policy - for whatever reasons - probably also plays a major role. Even though he likely doesn't really understand that either. Not that he would act differently if he did!
Walt gives his realist-theory view of US interests in Europe, which despite myself I have to admit is persuasive as far as it goes:
The U.S. interest in Europe is fairly straightforward. In addition to their mutually beneficial trade and investment relations, the United States has long sought to preserve an overall balance of power in Europe. ...
There is no potential hegemon in Europe today, however — neither Germany nor Russia has the population, economic strength, and military clout to take over the whole place — and thus there is no serious threat to the regional balance of power. Thus, the United States could (and should) reduce its military role and gradually turn European security back to the Europeans. [my emphasis]
And in line with that view, he thinks that it makes practical sense for the EU nations to maintain cohesion in the Union and take on a bigger role in continental defense. And, "Given that the United States still has an
interest in a tranquil Europe, a strong EU would be even more valuable if the U.S. security role in Europe were to decline."
But he doesn't think Trump is making any kind of realistic evaluation of US interests in his foreign policy: "The national interest is irrelevant; it’s the Nielsen ratings that count."
Gordon Adams uses a foreign-policy realist approach to poke holes in a fond bipartisan assumption, "Both liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans are struggling to recreate a myth: that the US dominates the world by dint of power, values, wisdom, even God’s decisions. America, and only America, can bring order and security to the world. Any other option spells chaos." (Beyond Hegemony And A Liberal International OrderLobeLog 05/17/2018)
I have a love-hate relationship with the "realist" school of foreign policy, prominently represented today by Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer, and Famous earlier realists included Kenneth Walz, George Kennan, Reinhold Neibuhr, and Hans Morgenthau. I've been guilty in the past of confusing Hans Morgenthau with Henry Morgenthau, Jr., who served as Secretary of Treasury 1934-1945. The latter was involved in major foreign policy issues. But Hans Morgenthau is the one renowned for his theoretical contributions to foreign policy studies, notably with his 1948 book Politics Among Nations.
The article on Hans Morgenthau in the ever-trusty Encyclopaedia Britannica summarizes the bare bones of his Realist theory this way:
... Morgenthau maintained that politics is governed by distinct immutable laws of nature and that states could deduce rational and objectively correct actions from an understanding of these laws. Central to Morgenthau’s theory was the concept of power as the dominant goal in international politics and the definition of national interest in terms of power. His state-centred approach, which refused to identify the moral aspirations of a state with the objective moral laws that govern the universe, maintained that all state actions seek to keep, demonstrate, or increase power. He called for recognition of the nature and limits of power and for the use of traditional methods of diplomacy, including compromise.
On the one hand, that formulation doesn't work for me as an approach to foreign policy, because it suggests a kind of amorality in life-and-death decisions involving war and peace, and suggests an indifference or irrelevance to considerations of forms of government and ruling ideologies. That's the second part of my love/hate relationship with it. Also because the famous war criminal Henry Kissinger is thought to be a practitioner of it. The fact that I first encountered the theory in a conservative text in my first college political science class, which was also taught by a hardcore Nixon-Agnew conservative professor, probably adds to its bad vibe for me.
The "love" part is my experience that practitioners of the realist approach has to do with the fact that they often come up with a more realistic practical assessment of foreign policy situations than more explicitly ideological approaches. The realist view has its own ideological implications, but let's leave that aside for now. Approaching issues while seriously trying to apply the realist assumptions means one has to think carefully about how the leaders and political actors of other countries are making judgments about their own national interests. And the realist approaches assumes that all countries view their national interests in ways that at least implicitly have general legitimacy. Done right, it provides a counter-balance to the temptation to assume the outcome that would be most congenial to one's own ideology or interests is the most likely one. And recognizes that what may look like an important but secondary stake for one country may be regarded by another as an existential matter.
The adherents of the realist view viewed the "unipolar moment" of the global dominance of the United States after the fall of the Eastern Bloc governments and of the USSR as an inevitably transitory state of affairs. They predicted that other countries would seek ways to counter the overwhelming American dominance and create new alliances and approaches in pursuit of that goal. And, in fact, that process has proceeded as expected. Jeremi Suri described those shifting balances in an article from the transition time between the Presidential election and the beginning of Trump's Administration, Blustering Toward ArmageddonThe American Prospect 01/03/2017. His focus is on the major ways that the incoming Trump Administration might manage that shifting matrix of power relations in a way that could lead to disaster. Although his well-founded pessimism about Trump's ability to manage foreign affairs successfully also seems to be influenced by a perhaps overconfident faith in the ability of the US to be a benign influence in the Middle East, in particular.
Gordon Adams is skeptical that the two major parties fully appreciate that we are undergoing a "fundamental shift in global realities—the centrifugal redistribution of power and influence in the international system that has brought to an end the 'American century.' The United States has become just another power in a system for which it no longer sets or enforces the rules, if it ever really did."
But Adams thinks the Democrats are generally being unrealistic about what the feasible alternatives to Trumpist foreign policy are: "Both political parties fail to cope with this reality. Democrats and liberals insist that Trump’s foreign-policy decisions threaten the 'rules-based' international order America built and dominated. A simple change in leadership, they believe, can restore order and America’s primacy."
And he sounds considerably more skeptical than Jeremi Suri about the American ability to shape political matters in the Middle East to our liking:
In the Middle East, the power shift is palpable. The United States has treated Iran as a pariah since 1979, trying to stuff the ayatollahs back into some imaginary bottle, hoping that they will go away or be overthrown. This approach has failed, and the withdrawal from the nuclear deal will only make that failure more evident. Iran is a regional power, defending its interests, engaging other powers and movements inside and outside the region, such as Russia. US regime change in Iraq not only destabilized the region but helped usher the Iranians into this active regional role. The other influential countries in the region, particularly Saudi Arabia and Israel, will have to deal with this reality.
In addition to these three countries, Russia is also key to regional stability and instability. There’s no way of pushing the Russians out, short of direct conflict. Nor can Turkey be forced to comply with American policy. It is clearly asserting its own interests and influence in three directions at the same time: Central Asia and Russia, Europe, and the Middle East. The invasion of Iraq may have helped open this Pandora’s box. The US is rapidly becoming a marginal player in the chaotic security environment of the Middle East.
... perhaps Americans should be experiencing a certain sense of pleasure, or Schadenfreude as they watch the Russians being drawn into what could prove to be a long and costly effort to “do something” in response to the growing military tensions between Israel and Iran and its allies in Syria, the Kremlin’s Middle Eastern protectorate. Good luck with that, President Putin!
He has a point!
Hadar recites some of the history of the US involvement in the Middle East. Which is not a story of "winning," which our current President pretends to think is the whole point of foreign policy. While we can certainly understand Russia's current expansion of influence in the Middle East as an instance of the Realist theory playing out in the real world, that doesn't mean that it hurts the United States more than it helps. And while the US should certainly try to promote peaceful relations in the Middle East, including a decent settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict, if Russia's luck in the region resembles that of the US the last couple of decades, that's a fate one should only wish onto an enemy.
Hadar argues:
While no one will be forcing the United States out of the Middle East anytime soon, it is true that under both former President Barack Obama and his successor in office, President Donald Trump, the decision not to intervene directly in the civil war in Syria, can be seen as part of an effort to reduce the level of U.S. military intervention in the Middle East. That does not amount to “isolationism” but it certainly challenges the axiom that Washington is required to immediately “do something” to resolve this or that conflict in the Middle East.
I tend to think he's overoptimistic there about American restraint. Obama did show a practical awareness that getting sucked in to a large intervention in the Syrian civil war would be a bad idea. But his Administration did try to put the American finger on the scales there, including direct support to some very dubious anti-government rebels. And the Obama/Hillary intervention in Libya with France and Britain was a reckless action with negative long-term consequences, and a disaster in the short-run, too. Albeit not as gigantic a disaster as the Iraq War. And I don't see that Trump has any policy goal as consistent as what Hadar calls "Trump’s goal of reducing U.S. military presence in the Middle East since it supposedly would lead to a confrontation between the United States and Iran."
Hadar may also have been letting hope get the better of judgment in his Don't Expect President Trump to Invade IranThe National Interest 02/21/2018. In the three months since then, Trump has brought on John Bolton as National Security Adviser and a buildup for a war with Iran sure looks like it's in process. But he does take a worthwhile shot at the way that the "Munich analogy" has served as musical accompaniment to some really bad foreign policy decisions:
For much of the post-1945 era, Western leaders, applying the lessons of World War II, operated under the assumption that the adoption of a policy of appeasement towards Nazi Germany, symbolized by the agreement that the British and French leaders signed with Adolf Hitler in Munich in 1938, helped encourage German military aggression that eventually led to the breakout of war in Europe.
The result was that the United States and its Western allies held to the conviction that they needed to avert another Munich, which meant that they had to adopt a tough and uncompromising diplomatic and military stand against any potential aggressor, whom they were quick to compare to another Hitler.
So if Egyptian nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser and Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh were “like Hitler,” failing to use military power in response to any bellicose action on their part would amount to appeasement.
I don't have much distinctive to say about professional warmonger John Bolton, now becoming the President's National Security Adviser.
Some of the early reactions in Twitter were pretty striking.
This is a dangerous new phase of Trump's presidency. He is in the process of removing the few adults around him, replacing them with a Star Wars cantina of toadies and sycophants who will reflect back at him his own glorious view of himself, and help sell it on TV. https://t.co/BoPuUCdlGp
It's time to panic now. John Bolton's rise to power puts us on a path to war--and, since Trump appointed him while knowing his views, it means Trump wants to be on that path. My @Slate column: https://t.co/7Rv7Gn5mVS
Let me be clear: Bolton’s appointment is on par with most of Trump’s personnel choices, which is to say that it’s likely to be a disaster. His views on foreign policy are crude and bellicose, and his track record as a policy advocate and pundit do not, to put it politely, inspire confidence. Nor does he seem to have learned a thing from his past mistakes. And where McMaster and Tillerson did what they could to limit the damage that Trump has done to America’s international reputation and critical alliance partnerships, Bolton’s particular skill as a diplomat seems to have been finding creative new ways to offend America’s friends. [my emphasis]
But Walt also reminds us that, for all his deserved bad press, John Bolton is very much within the broad foreign policy establishment consensus in the US. Walt doesn't mean that as praise:
Look at Bolton’s pedigree and career. He’s a graduate of Yale University and Yale Law School. He worked at Covington & Burling, a venerable D.C. law firm where former Secretary of State Dean Acheson once worked. He has been a senior fellow for years at the conservative but mainstream American Enterprise Institute. He writes frequently for obscure, wild-and-crazy “radical” publications like, er … the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and even Foreign Policy. This is your idea of a “fringe” figure?
True, Bolton was a vocal supporter of the Iraq War, but that hardly makes him a weirdo. As I’m sure he’d be the first to point out, a lot of other people drank that particular Kool-Aid, including Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Jim Steinberg, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Susan Rice, Robert Gates, and a long, long list of other “respectable” figures. And don’t forget that the other geniuses who dreamed up and sold that disaster — people like William Kristol, James Woolsey, Robert Kagan, Bret Stephens, Max Boot, Eliot Cohen, David Frum, Paul Wolfowitz, etc. — are still respected figures in the foreign policy establishment despite having never admitted they were wrong or expressed any public regret for launching a disastrous war in which hundreds of thousands of people died.
He has vigorously opposed the Iran nuclear deal, and no doubt will back Trump's threats to withdraw from the landmark accord. Before it was signed in 2015, he suggested bombing Iran to quash its nuclear ambitions.
He also has called for a military attack on nuclear-armed North Korea. Six months ago, as Trump and North Korean ruler Kim Jong Un traded insults and threats, Bolton said the solution was to topple the Pyongyang government and have South Korea take over the North.
Here’s just how radical Donald Trump’s appointment of John Bolton as national security advisor really is: the Financial Times reports that even Iran hawks such as Mark Dubowitz, the head of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, are rubbing their eyes in disbelief. ...
Strictly speaking, Bolton is not a neocon, but there is definite consanguinity. Bolton has never been worked up about the democratization of other countries. When I saw him on the eve of the Iraq War at the State Department as part of a group of Los Angeles Times editors, he made it abundantly clear that he simply wanted to smash Iraq. He’s a regime-change kind of guy: go in. Take out the enemy. Then leave. Do it again if necessary. So what Trump’s moves seem to signal is the rise of conservative nationalism or, to put it another way, the Cheney doctrine on steroids.
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 TrumpTomDispatch 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.
Any attempt to define a coherent plan behind the Trump Administration's foreign policy is bound to run up against the arbitrary, the petty, and the just plain goofy.
But Asli Bâli and Aziz Rana take a stab at it in America's Imperial UnravelingBoston Review 10/16/2017. They call attention to a key paradox of US unilateral tendencies in international relations:
... the reliance on a politics of unilateral force has produced an interesting disconnect. While during the Cold War the United States faced serious adversaries, it was nonetheless largely able to avoid any real experience of existential threat. Today, faced with far more limited foes, the country has adopted a politics that presents the real possibility of existential violence and nuclear confrontation.
They identify two important tendencies in Trump's foreign policy:
If there is something like a “Trump Doctrine,” it lies in two developments: the boldness with which a declared reliance on coercion and conquest now sits uncomfortably beside America’s professed moral authority; and the implications of Trump’s ethno-nationalism for how global allies and enemies are conceived. For starters, whereas earlier administrations emphasized the need for diplomacy even as they consistently preferred unilateral uses of military force, Trump eschews such niceties. Instead his administration is at pains to dismantle the infrastructure of the State Department, with the president declaring that the United States intends to “take Iraq’s oil” and plunder “Afghanistan’s minerals.” Trump’s bald reliance on strongman tactics is difficult for elites to reconcile with their persistent belief in American exceptionalism. Yet, this is simply the culmination of the last quarter-century’s cleaving of U.S. power from its classic justifications.
The other development is that by giving a seat at the foreign policy table to proponents of a virulent ethno-nationalism, Trump’s presidency marks a shift in U.S. self-presentation. Such ethno-nationalists contest the universalist and inclusive premises of Cold War rhetoric. They defend a harsh anti-immigrant position and proclaim the link between Americanism and European racial and cultural identity. These racialized premises are central to the fixation with Iran - rather than say Russia for example - and to the insistence that a country with which the United States was, until recently, able to conduct complex diplomacy now presents a paramount national threat. [my emphasis]
But they aren't making the suggestion that because Trump's foreign policy continues some major trends in US policy that we shouldn't consider it as especially radical.
They also suggest, without putting in exactly these terms, that Trump policy in the Greater Middle East may be the kind of laboratory for brutal mischief in something like the way Central America was for the Reagan Administration. "Trump’s posture on Syria is to treat the country as a sandbox where he can try out various regional alliances, without any actual plan for - or regard to - how lasting peace might be generated there."
They provide a useful description of the contradictory nature of the position the US established for itself in the world in the postwar period under the assumption that America had a legitimate mission to shape the world in our own image:
In practice, this justified restructuring foreign societies on U.S. terms by spreading abroad both market-based capitalism and the institutions of liberal democracy. It also called for the creation of an international framework marked by these same principles, especially through multilateral and consensus-based legal structures, to address the problems of global governance. The United States was at the forefront of establishing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations Charter, the Bretton Woods institutions, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and a plethora of other interlocking institutions aimed at shaping everything from international monetary policy and global trade to health, education, and scientific cooperation. The overall aim was a U.S.-led world driven by collective security and capitalist economic principles, with U.S. military power and wealth as the ultimate backstop. [my emphasis]
They remind us of some of the mistakes and bad acts of US foreign policy in that process. But as long as the Soviet Union existed as a competing superpower, US policy also had a major stabilizing effect on international politics, as well. But, "While the end of the Cold War meant the end of the perceived Soviet threat, it also decreased the pressures that had led U.S. leaders to value international institutions as conducive to national self-interest."
The Clinton Administration embraced that process tending toward more unilateralism. The Cheney-Bush Administration embraced unilateralism with enthusiasm. "The George W. Bush administration repudiated the Geneva Conventions when justifying its use of force against al Qaeda, withdrew from arms control agreements, and promulgated a national security strategy premised on preemption." Yes, he did.
And then there was the Libya War, in which President Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton willingly intervened:
If anything, the 2011 intervention in Libya, which recalled the chaos and violence of the Iraq invasion a decade earlier, raised doubts about whether the United States was legitimate - or even competent—in its uses of force. Whatever the stated aim—whether fighting terrorism, countering arms proliferation, or serving humanitarianism - U.S. military force seemed ill-suited for the task.
Yet, "For all the ways that the Obama years continued the basic orientation of U.S. foreign policy - highlighted specifically by the intervention in Libya and the arming of factions in Syria - the one break was his focus on using diplomacy with Iran to deescalate any nuclear confrontation."
This is a very useful piece in trying to understand the current direction - such as there is - of US foreign policy under Trump.
"Venezuela is Latin America's biggest exporter of crude oil and has the world's largest petroleum reserves." - Brian Ellsworth and Andrew Cawthorne, Venezuela death toll rises to 13 as protests flareReuters 02/24/2014
The Trump Family Business Administration is now calling the Venezuelan government a dictatorship and elected President Nicolás Maduro a dictator. And his CIA is all but explicitly declaring that they are actively supporting a regime change effort there. A State Department spokesperson today called the election for a Constituent Assembly in Venezuela on Sunday was "illegitimate." (State Department news briefingPBS Newshour 08/01/2017)
She mentioned that Vice President Pence has spoken directly to one of the main opposition leaders in Venezuela, Leopoldo López, and communicated to him that the US is concerned about what she called "grave human rights" abuses. She quoted Pence as saying, "The United States stands with the Venezuelan people and we call for the full and unconditional release of all political prisoners in Venezuela, free and fair elections, restoration of the National Assembly, and respect for human rights in Venezuela." She says "the United States urges the re-establishment of democracy in Venezuela."
At the same press conference, ExxonMobil Secretary of State Rex Tillerson addressed Venezuela starting at 35:00, saying that US policy is to work with like-minded governments in the Organization of American States (OAS) "as well as others who share our view of Venezuela's future." He articulated the current official US position representing Sunday's vote as abolishing democracy in Venezuela. Whether Secretary ExxonMobil cares about human rights and democracy in Venezuela or is thinking mainly of the oil, you can make your own guess. López and another major opposition leader who had been under house arrest were returned to prison after Sunday's election, charged with violating the terms of their house arrest. Tillerson presented that as a "re-arrest." And in what could easily been heard as a threat - to me it obviously is a threat - he said that "this could lead to an outbreak of further violence in the country." He followed it up by saying, "We are evaluating all of our policy options as to what can we do to create a change of conditions where either Maduro decides he doesn't have a future and wants to leave of his own accord, or we can return the government processes back to their constitution."
The US at this point isn't even calling for Bashar al-Assad's removal of head of government in Syria. We Americans are shocked, shocked that Russia would try to fiddle around in our elections last year. But Latin America, we can openly declare we're ousting an elected President there and it's just routine business, because we're Exceptional. None of this looks good to me. I wish I could expect to hear an outcry in Congress over something like this. But I'm not holding my breath.
Without belaboring it, I'll point out here that the current Venezuelan government, both President and National Assembly (Congress), were elected in competitive elections. A Constituent Assembly to write a new Constitution was not so long ago a demand of the anti-Maduro opposition. But the opposition boycotted Sunday's election. It's clear that there have been police and military abuses in Venezuela, which the anti-Maduro opposition has made sure are are presented to the American public via an all-too-uncritical media. The organized and spontaneous violent actions by the opposition have not received similar publicity in the US.
I'm not going to recount the past 18 years of Venezuelan politics in every post on Venezuela. And I'm not going to repeat every time I quote or share something from TeleSUR that it is primarily funded by Venezuela with contributions from several other South American countries and takes a sympathetic position toward the current Venezuelan government of Nicolás Maduro. I assume that readers can apply reasonably critical thinking to what they read and hear. Not everyone does, I know. But that's the operative assumption at this blog.
I also try to avoid facile comparisons between how the US approaches foreign affairs and how we object to similar practices on the part of other countries. That's partly because hypocrisy of that sort is part of the common currency of diplomacy. But the fact that the US feels so little embarrassment about regime change operations is one reason that we can't reasonably expect Latin Americans to be shocked, shocked by the accusations the US intelligence agencies and the media have been making about Russian interference in the 2016 American elections. And do you remember the last time we let somebody out of prison because a hostile foreign government demanded it? Me neither. But we're American and we're Exceptional.
Also, it's a useful exercise to imagine that the Russian Foreign Minister just gave a press conference declaring, "We are evaluating all of our policy options as to what can we do to create a change of conditions where either Trump decides he doesn't have a future and wants to leave of his own accord, or we can return the government processes back to their constitution."
TeleSUR carried this clip of Maduro responding to the escalation of the rhetoric from the US government against Venezuela
Abby Martin in this edition of her Empire Files program on TeleSUR interviews the head of the Venezuelan National Guard. And she elecits his responses to some of the serious accusations being made against him. Head of Venezuela National Guard on Insurgency & US Threats 07/31/2017:
The rhetorical - and almost certainly not only rhetorical - escalation that Venezuela now faces from the US certainly give Maduro the ability to frame the internal political struggle in Venezuela as an anti-imperialist stand for democracy and against US imperialism. In this clip (Maduro: Trump arremete contra el pueblo de México y nadie alza la vozTeleSUR 07/31/2017), he asks at the start (in Spanish), "Are you with Trump or are you with Venezuela? Are you with Trump or are you with democracy? Are you with Trump or are you with the destiny of the free peoples of the world? ... Are you with Trump or are you with the Free World?"
Danielle Ryan has a sensible take on Bundespräsident Von Trump's approach to foreign policy to date, Trump’s foreign policy: Bizarre and inconsistent, or more strategic than we think?Salon 07/30/2017: "Maybe the haphazardness and mixed messages that characterize Trumpian foreign policy are part of a grander strategy we cannot yet perceive — or maybe they are indicative of an administration that can’t even manage itself, never mind complex international conflicts."
She observes that such inconsistency isn't entirely surprising, "He has been on both sides of most issues at one point or another."
Ryan uses the example of Trump bombing Syria and then later ending support to the fabled Syrian Moderates, seemingly conflicting positions. She also notes that despite his apparent desire to improve relations with Russia, Trump's administration also announced what could be a significant anti-Russian escalation with Ukraine:
Why then, just a week later, did the new U.S. special envoy on Ukraine, Kurt Volker, announce during an interview in Paris that the U.S. was now considering sending weapons to the Kiev government, which could be used against pro-Russian rebels in the breakaway eastern regions of the country — a move that would undoubtedly undo any Moscow goodwill resulting from the decision to stop arming rebels in Syria?
And she describes:
... a creeping advance on the town of [Russian separatist area] Avdiivka by Kiev’s forces — and a subsequent effort to lay the blame solely on the separatists, while maintaining the government’s innocence.
Ukraine’s deputy defense minister blew the lid off that narrative when he told Ukrainian media: “As of today, despite everything, meter by meter, step by step, whenever possible, our boys have been advancing.”
It is unrealistic to think that support and weapons from the Trump administration would not increase tensions in Ukraine and irritate an already complicated situation. Throwing new weapons at the problem is no solution.
It would be a mistake to discount the role of plain incompetence in the Trump Family Business Administration's policies, foreign and otherwise.
Some progressives have expressed the hope that Trump is rejecting the "War Party" in favor of a less interventionist foreign policy. The problem is that Old Right isolationist views can sound superficially like pacifist ones. But that outlook, which seems to be Trump's basic reference point in foreign policy, is actually highly nationalistic and leans toward unilateral military solutions. This administration's dramatic de-emphasis on even basic staffing for the State Department and US embassies abroad is consistent with the rightwing isolationist approach.
Ryan opens the piece describing how cutting off the aid to the legendary Syrian Moderates can be taken as a pro-Russian policy, an anti-interventionist policy and/or a realistic, pragmatic move:
When Trump administration officials announced an end to the covert CIA program to arm and train Syrian rebels in their fight against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, many framed it as a win for Russia — and while it was indeed something Russia had been seeking for years, it also, more importantly, made sense.
For years, this “secret” effort to aid rebels against Assad had been openly reported. The program enjoyed a budget of up to $1 billion per year — yet it had achieved absolutely nothing. It only helped prolong the war and actually aided groups like al-Nusra (al-Qaida’s Syrian affiliate) and ISIS by allowing arms meant for “moderate” groups to enter into their hands instead.
Despite the effort ending in abject failure, much of the media reporting painted the decision to end this scheme as a catastrophe — simply because it also happened to benefit Russia (which supports Assad against the rebel forces). [my emphasis]
But even a strongly antiwar foreign policy would require competent diplomacy. And so far, that doesn't seem to be a prominent characteristic of this administration.
The Washington Post presented a new report on Friday about the Obama Administration's investigation and response to the intelligence of Russian hacking aimed at influencing the 2016 Presidential election, Obama’s secret struggle to punish Russia for Putin’s election assault 06/23/2017.
For me, this one was stunning in a kind of numbing way.
For one thing, it reminds me again of how much of this story is based on leaked claims from sources not known to the public. That's especially concerning since I'm hearing Democrats more and more talking about the Russian hacking in 2016 as an "act of war." And if we're going to take the kind of measures against Russia that countries take in response to acts of war, it doesn't inspire a lot of confidence that we're not only so dependent on not just highly on very secret intelligence information but on a variety of unverified leaks from intelligence agencies and other anonymous sources.
It wasn't too difficult to believe that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor actually occurred. Or the bringing down of the Twin Towers in 2001.
Then there was a famous incident in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964 whose exact nature is still in dispute. And it was still a long time untilt he covert American military actions that preceded it.
And of course, there were the famous "weapons of mass destruction" that made the invasion of Iraq necessary in 2003. The extent of the threat is still unknown, since none of those "WMDs" has yet to be found.
More recently, there was this: Seymour Hersh, Trump‘s Red LineWelt 06/25/2017. On April 4, the Syrians bombed a facility. On April 6, President Trump launched a Tomahawk missile launch on a Syrian Air Force base in retaliation. The justification was that Syria had used sarin gas in the April 4 attack:
Within hours of the April 4 bombing, the world’s media was saturated with photographs and videos from Khan Sheikhoun. Pictures of dead and dying victims, allegedly suffering from the symptoms of nerve gas poisoning, were uploaded to social media by local activists, including the White Helmets, a first responder group known for its close association with the Syrian opposition.
The provenance of the photos was not clear and no international observers have yet inspected the site, but the immediate popular assumption worldwide was that this was a deliberate use of the nerve agent sarin, authorized by President Bashar Assad of Syria. Trump endorsed that assumption by issuing a statement within hours of the attack, describing Assad’s "heinous actions" as being a consequence of the Obama administration’s "weakness and irresolution" in addressing what he said was Syria’s past use of chemical weapons. [my emphasis]
What Hersh reports, with sourcing to high-level, anonymous American sources, is that the US intelligence community (IC) had a high level of confidence in intelligence provided by the Russians indicating that the target was a meeting of opposition leaders - "radical Islamic terrorists" in the Republicans' conjuring formula. More specifically, "Ahrar al-Sham and the al-Qaida-affiliated group formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra." And he reports, "The advance intelligence on the target, as supplied by the Russians, was given the highest possible score inside the American community." Why that advanced intelligence was so important to evaluating the July 4 attack is something Hearst explains in the piece. Short version: the IC believed based on the information they had that the facility bombed had chemicals stored there that would have more plausibly accounted for the damage observed afterward than the assumption of a sarin gas attack.
After the July 4 bombing, Hearst reports, "A Bomb Damage Assessment (BDA) by the U.S. military later determined that the heat and force of the 500-pound Syrian bomb triggered a series of secondary explosions that could have generated a huge toxic cloud that began to spread over the town, formed by the release of the fertilizers, disinfectants and other goods stored in the basement, its effect magnified by the dense morning air, which trapped the fumes close to the ground."
As Hearst reports it, Trump was persuaded by the reports of a Syrian sarin gas attack, which according to the information Hearst reports, is unlikely in the extreme. He quotes a source he identifies as "a senior adviser to the American intelligence community, who has served in senior positions in the Defense Department and Central Intelligence Agency" describing Trump's reaction, which sounds pretty impulsive:
Trump, a constant watcher of television news, said, while King Abdullah of Jordan was sitting next to him in the Oval Office, that what had happened was “horrible, horrible” and a “terrible affront to humanity.” Asked if his administration would change its policy toward the Assad government, he said: “You will see.” He gave a hint of the response to come at the subsequent news conference with King Abdullah: “When you kill innocent children, innocent babies – babies, little babies – with a chemical gas that is so lethal ... that crosses many, many lines, beyond a red line . ... That attack on children yesterday had a big impact on me. Big impact ... It’s very, very possible ... that my attitude toward Syria and Assad has changed very much.”
Within hours of viewing the photos, the adviser said, Trump instructed the national defense apparatus to plan for retaliation against Syria. “He did this before he talked to anybody about it. The planners then asked the CIA and DIA if there was any evidence that Syria had sarin stored at a nearby airport or somewhere in the area. Their military had to have it somewhere in the area in order to bomb with it.” “The answer was, ‘We have no evidence that Syria had sarin or used it,’” the adviser said. “The CIA also told them that there was no residual delivery for sarin at Sheyrat [the airfield from which the Syrian SU-24 bombers had taken off on April 4] and Assad had no motive to commit political suicide.” Everyone involved, except perhaps the president, also understood that a highly skilled United Nations team had spent more than a year in the aftermath of an alleged sarin attack in 2013 by Syria, removing what was said to be all chemical weapons from a dozen Syrian chemical weapons depots.
And despite the paucity of evidence for the claim, "it was impossible for the experts to persuade the president of this once he had made up his mind."
After the strike, the rewards were rich in PR:
The next few days were his most successful as president. America rallied around its commander in chief, as it always does in times of war. Trump, who had campaigned as someone who advocated making peace with Assad, was bombing Syria 11 weeks after taking office, and was hailed for doing so by Republicans, Democrats and the media alike. One prominent TV anchorman, Brian Williams of MSNBC, used the word “beautiful” to describe the images of the Tomahawks being launched at sea. Speaking on CNN, Fareed Zakaria said: “I think Donald Trump became president of the United States.” A review of the top 100 American newspapers showed that 39 of them published editorials supporting the bombing in its aftermath, including the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. [emphasis in original]
How does this relate to the Trump-Russia scandal? In several ways.
One is that Russia is militarily involved in Syria. And that even under the Obama Administration, there was some level of cooperation between the US and Russia in the area, even though their end goals were different. Protocols were in place to minimize the likelihood of direct clashes between US and Russian forces. What Hersh's article describes is an impulsive President making a military decision with a great potential for risk and little if any positive return in that situation. Hersh says of Trump's missile strike on July 6, "All in all, it was little more than an expensive fireworks display."
Another is that the events and decisions described in Hersh's article don't fit any simple narrative of Trump as being beholden to Russia or reflexively supporting the Russian position. There are various speculations that could fit that situation. But it is notable that the Trump Family Business Administration spun it as a sign of Russia's perfidy:
Five days later [after the missile strike on Syria], the Trump administration gathered the national media for a background briefing on the Syrian operation that was conducted by a senior White House official who was not to be identified. The gist of the briefing was that Russia’s heated and persistent denial of any sarin use in the Khan Sheikhoun bombing was a lie because President Trump had said sarin had been used. That assertion, which was not challenged or disputed by any of the reporters present, became the basis for a series of further criticisms:
-The continued lying by the Trump administration about Syria’s use of sarin led to widespread belief in the American media and public that Russia had chosen to be involved in a corrupt disinformation and cover-up campaign on the part of Syria.
-Russia’s military forces had been co-located with Syria’s at the Shayrat airfield (as they are throughout Syria), raising the possibility that Russia had advance notice of Syria’s determination to use sarin at Khan Sheikhoun and did nothing to stop it.
-Syria’s use of sarin and Russia’s defense of that use strongly suggested that Syria withheld stocks of the nerve agent from the UN disarmament team that spent much of 2014 inspecting and removing all declared chemical warfare agents from 12 Syrian chemical weapons depots, pursuant to the agreement worked out by the Obama administration and Russia after Syria’s alleged, but still unproven, use of sarin the year before against a rebel redoubt in a suburb of Damascus.
The apparently false information given by the Administration to justify the Tomahawk strikes is also very relevant to the Trump-Russia story. Governments lie. And it's seriously discouraging to see that many leading Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, along with many of our star pundits and commentators, endorsed this strike and its justifications,without serious questioning. For the Trump-Russia investigation, that emphasizes yet again how important it is to have a credible investigation with relevant facts explained clearly to the public. If the IC is right in claiming that the Russians hacked US computers illegally - and I assume at this point that the basic story is correct - the public needs to know that the national government is doing something effective to protect critical election infrastructure from hacking attacks. And we need to know the real story behind the dealings of the Trump campaign with dubious Russian actors, including the kind of business ties he has with Russian companies through which he could receive emoluments. But, of course, if the information was falsified by the IC, that's something the public should know, too!
And just as the Hersh article contains material that troubles a simple Trump-is-acting-on-behalf-of-Putin construction, the WaPo piece also contains a kind of "poison pill" for the Democrats, as well. If the evidence was as clear to the IC as the report claims, they Obama's restrained handling of the information priority to the election looks all too much like more dysfunctional Bipartisanship on his part.
Trump himself is using the information to "gaslight" the Democrats, perhaps without fully realizing the extent to which he is conceding that there was serious Russian interference in the 2016 election:
Since the Obama Administration was told way before the 2016 Election that the Russians were meddling, why no action? Focus on them, not T!
Democratic "Bipartisanship" is becoming a bit of a personal White Whale for me. But in thinking through ways that direct meddling with the voter counts can be countered, it seems obvious that some sort of required paper trail with follow-up audits would remove a lot of the potential for vote-manipulation through computer hacking. Like paper ballots that are counted by optical scan. Also, some standard national procedure for preventing hinky voter purges. The kind of stuff that would also put the kibosh on a lot of the segregationist voter-suppression mischief that the Republicans made part of their standard operating procedure years ago.
So if the Democrats, including the last Democratic President, had raised a lot more holy hell the last 10 years over segregationist voter suppression, there's some good chance that our national electoral system would be considerably safer against direct hacking from Russians or segregationists or crooked voting machine companies. But being rude like that might have disturbed the quest for ... Bipartisanship! Because the Republicans would have said the Mean Libruls weren't being nice to them. Republicans definitely need some manners lessons. But Democrats need some Malvina Reynolds lessons, provided here by Delila Paz.
President Trump created some press that no doubt pleased his fans earlier this month, saying that he had given his Secretary of Defense, James "Mad Dog" Mattis, who until recently was a serving general, the authority to decide on troop levels in Afghanistan. Pentagon stenographer and nominal reporter Michael Gordon reported on it for the New York Times, Trump Gives Mattis Authority to Send More Troops to Afghanistan 06/13/2017:
One United States official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was discussing internal deliberations, said that Mr. Trump decided on Tuesday morning to grant Mr. Mattis the authority. It was the latest in a series of moves by the White House to give the Pentagon and its military commanders more latitude to deploy forces and carry out operations.
Mr. Mattis alluded somewhat cryptically to the decision when he testified on Tuesday morning to the Senate Armed Services Committee. During his appearance, the defense secretary promised Congress that the Trump administration would develop a new strategy for Afghanistan by mid-July to turn around the war.
That timetable led to a feisty exchange with Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and the committee’s chairman, who complained that the Pentagon had yet to present a plan to regain momentum in a conflict that has been going on for more than 15 years.
“We’re now six months into this administration,” Mr. McCain said. “We still haven’t got a strategy for Afghanistan. It makes it hard for us to support you when we don’t have a strategy.”
Letting the generals run the war and not having civilians interfere with them is a favorite trope of conservatives. It reflects the chronic alibi-making from the military - we did everything right, it's just that the meddling politicians messed things up - that finds a welcome audience among military-idolizing Republicans. There is always somebody who will say we could have "won" if the US had just put in more troops, dropped more bombs, been more ruthless in killing civilians and torturing prisoners, etc, etc.
For the elected officials to defer unquestioningly to the generals on matters of war and peace would be irresponsible. And they often have been, including Congress in their shameless abandonment of their Constitutional responsibilities on war and peace. And, in general, the post-World War II foreign policy of the US has been excessively militarized in the sense of relying disproportionately on military threats and coercion as compared to reliance on diplomacy and "soft power." In a sad twist, the fall of the Soviet Union that made the United States the unquestioned sole superpower, or hyperpower, or global hegemon, resulted in a heavier reliance on military action than previously. And that really is a problem of both parties.
The Cheney-Bush Administration made a big show of giving the military everything they needed. But that was PR posturing. They did inflate the military budget, because pumping public money into the profits of the weapons manufacturers is a shared mission demanded by the donor class of their sponsored politicians in both parties. Actually, that Administration imposed some fairly strict military scrutiny and control of military operations. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was particularly focused on the idea that the US could knock off a "rouge" government with minimal forces and quickly install a new, stable government. So he insisted on going into to Afghanistan with limited force at the start.
Journalist Philip Smucker provided an account of how Rummy's strict imposition of his minimalist daydreams affected the Afghanistan War during what we now know was its early days in Al Qaeda's Great Escape: The Military and the Media on Terror's Trail (2004).
The problem with that approach was even more dramatically evident in the invasion of Iraq. While US forces were staging a propaganda scene of pulling down a statue of Saddam in Baghdad, looters were getting ready to sack anything and everything they could. By all accounts I've seen, the mass looting episode in Baghdad was a critical moment very early in the occupation that made establishing order far more difficult. Rummy insisted in limiting the number of troops, largely dismissing the risk that the occupation forces would run into protracted resistance after the regime's fall.
Whether Trump likes it or not, he is still responsible for managing the armed forces. And, of course, Mad Dog Mattis is serving in a civilian office, despite his recent status as a general. And i's highly unlikely that either Mattis nor his generals and admirals will abandon their well-established practices of providing alibis so that they can blame the meddling civilians one way or another for any military failures. As Fred Kaplan writes, "Letting a Cabinet secretary make the call does not let him off the hook; deciding not to decide is itself a decision." (An Abdication of DutySlate 06/15/2017)
The main problem in Trump giving the nod to Mattis to escalate US troops presence and military activity in Afghanistan, he's escalating the risks inherent in continuing direct participation in the war there. Kaplan observes:
Mattis was an excellent wartime commander as a Marine. He is well-read in history and philosophy. But even the best Marines are trained mainly to execute policy, not to make it. And to the best wartime generals, the mandate of carrying out policy means winning the war. Retreating, withdrawing, drawing down — these might (or might not) be the preferences of a president, who views a war’s costs and benefits in the context of many other priorities, but they have little place in the thinking of a general whose job is to focus only on the war. (Mattis, who retired from the Marines four years ago, is now the civilian overseer of the Defense Department, but his reading of military history and his experience as an officer — a wartime commander, at that — govern his thinking about national-security matters.)
In other words, by turning over his authority to Mattis, Trump has all but guaranteed that more American troops will soon be sent to Afghanistan. Senior officers in the Pentagon have reportedly asked for another 5,000 troops in addition to the 8,000 still there. It’s a fair bet that Mattis will endorse the request. And it’s also a fair bet that they won’t be the last American troops sent over. When things go badly in a war, an officer’s natural instinct is to believe that a few more battalions or brigades might turn the tide. President Lyndon Johnson acceded to this instinct in Vietnam. President Obama quashed it in Afghanistan. (Obama let the generals have 30,000 more troops at the end of 2009 but said he’d start withdrawing them 18 months later if they failed to accomplish the mission by then — and, to everyone’s surprise, he kept his promise.) [my emphasis]
That delegation of authority is wrong not because civilian leaders necessarily have better judgment on such things than military officers. ...
What is instead wrong about the current president’s approach is that it loses sight of the principle that militarily achieving certain things on the ground is a means, not an end. Trump’s approach fails to acknowledge the need for a military expedition to have a clear objective that is not defined in a circular, self-referential way solely in military terms. It fails to acknowledge not only the need for careful assessment of what can be achieved with military force but also whether such achievement is worth whatever costs are entailed, bearing in mind the full range of U.S. interests that may be at stake, including alternative purposes to which scarce national resources might be put. That last topic gets squarely to questions of troop levels in foreign lands. And it is a topic that the military should not be expected to try to answer on its own.
[my emphasis]
A Politico EU article by Howard Amos suggests that Russia is pursuing a more active policy in the Balkans against further NATO expansion there. (Vladimir Putin’s man in the Balkans 06/21/17)
The article's narrative structure is a bit confusing. But it says that a hawkish adviser of Putin's, Nikolai Patrushev, has been given a more prominent role in Russian foreign policy for the Balkans. It cites Mark Galeotti of the Institute of International Relations, "Patrushev is definitely one of those people who think Russia is in an existential struggle for its survival. It’s a Cold-War, Manichean vision of the world. And one in which any reversals for the West are implicitly good for Russia."
And Amos reports:
In public statements, Patrushev has claimed the United States is striving to dismember the Russian state to “open up access to rich resources that they think Russia unfairly controls.” He has also criticized what he sees as increasingly aggressive behavior from NATO, claimed that European Union foreign policy is dictated from Washington and warned of the rise of Nazism in Eastern Europe. ...
Russia is particularly angry over the accession to NATO earlier this month of Montenegro, the small Adriatic country that accused Russian intelligence officers of masterminding an attempted coup in the country last year, apparently designed to derail its bid to join the alliance.
In the wake of allegations of Russian involvement in the murky coup plot, Patrushev rushed to Serbia to meet top government and security officials, in what many saw as a mission to smooth ruffled feathers. Media reports had suggested Belgrade had extradited several Russian nationals accused of masterminding the plot.
NATO expansion means increasing tensions with Russia, and has already encountered notable Russian pushback in Georgia and Ukraine. In strictly practical terms, whatever gains the NATO countries expect to obtain with further expansion, intensified Russian resistance is part of the cost.
A strong and militaristic trend toward unilateralism in American foreign and military policy didn't begin for the Republican Party with the nomination of Donald Trump for President in 2016.
I'm not trying to make a case for "normalizing" bad behavior by the Trump Family Business Administration. But I am pointing out how deeply rooted this set of bad ideas is within the Republican Party.
Philip Gordon's and Jeremy Shapiro's book Allies At War: America, Europe, and the Crisis Over Iraq (2004) had this to say about the Cheney-Bush Administration's general attitude post-9/11 about alliances and unilateral actions by the United States. This comes in a discussion of how the Administration shafted European and other allies over an environmental agreement by rejecting the Kyoto Protocol:
In retrospect, the manner in which the U.S. government withdrew from the process of international negotiation on global warming signaled more than just a repudiation of Kyoto. The harsh diplomatic style of the rejection contrasted sharply even with a similar rejection by the Reagan administration of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea in 1982, when that administration also decided to reject a treaty that its predecessors had supported. But unlike the Kyoto rejection, before doing so the Reagan administration sent a special envoy - ironically, Donald Rumsfeld - to consult with allied governments and convince them not to sign or ratify the treaty. While that position hardly endeared him to European publics, Reagan's willingness to conform to established practices of consultation meant that criticism focused on the U.S. objections to the treaty itself, rather than on its potential to cause a breakdown in the alliance. ...
Bush's efforts with the allies, however - as one senior administration official put it - could best be described as "multilateralism à la carte." He was willing to use multilateral forums when they presented the most convenient path to accomplishing some specific U.S. foreign policy goal. But much of the administration never seemed to believe that U.S. commitment to international institutions and allied relationships had a long-term value that justified U.S. engagement when unilateral action- or actions with the support of certain individual countries-would be more expedient in the short term. The sum total of Bush's actions in his administration's first two years sent the clear signal that this type of deeper commitment simply did not exist. [my emphasis]
Cheney and Bush also used rejection of an international environmental agreement to thumb their noses at the European allies.
Where Gordon and Shapiro could say of that Administration, "The sum total of Bush's actions in his administration's first two years sent the clear signal that this type of deeper commitment [to NATO allies] simply did not exist," the Trump Family Business Administration has managed to do that in less than half a year.
