Category: Foreign Policy

Defense Policy, Foreign Policy

A Victory by Any other Name

Bob Claude |

War is hell, and so the only responsible goal of war is a clear and attainable victory.  This victory can take many forms. Far from being “precipitous”, President Trump’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq recognizes the fact of our victories in both conflicts. In contrast, the critics of this decision seek to deny them and expand the goals of both wars to encompass goals that history shows are unattainable in our lifetimes.

The despicable attacks of September 11, 2001 should have always been the touchstone of the definition of victory in the Afghan War. Our goals then were clear and simple – the defeat of Al Qaeda and its Taliban enablers.   We accomplished both objectives. Osama bin Laden lies dead at the hands of an American SEAL team and Al Qaeda has been decimated as an operational entity, reduced to being simply a slogan.  The Taliban were driven from power in Afghanistan and a new government installed that is more tolerant and internationally responsible.  It is not a perfect peace and the centuries-old ethnic rivalries and internal wars that defeated the British and the Russians means that the current government could fall and potentially be replaced by the Taliban. In that event, we have other levers of power to prevent another attack, such as immigration and trade sanctions. In the end, the future of Afghanistan will be up to the Afghan people. Its history proves that we cannot affect that decision any more than the British and Russian Empires could.  Our only interest is to prevent further terrorism from originating in Afghanistan and, as this article points out, our victory lays a solid groundwork for achieving this result.

Our intervention in the Syrian civil war was never necessary, but now ISIS has been defeated and no longer controls any territory.  This is a victory by any definition and justifies the complete withdrawal of all forces from Iraq and Syria.  Once again, our futile attempts to solve the religious and ethnic rivalries of the Middle East with American blood must come to an end.

After the final battle was won in the Spanish–American War, the War Department wanted Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and the army to remain in Cuba as an occupying force in clear conflict with our stated goal of supporting the Cuban people’s desire for independence.  In a letter that risked a court-martial, he said the army “must be moved at once or perish” from yellow fever and malaria.  Our soldiers must now be withdrawn from Afghanistan and Iraq to prevent similar unnecessary casualties. We can then concentrate on the new challenges of the multi-polar world and, in particular, those of China and Russia.   

2020 Election, Foreign Policy, Politics, Realist Theory

An American Nationalist Voting Index – Speaking Softly

Bob Claude |

This is part of a series examining the issues in the presidential election. To see other articles in the series, click on the “2020 Elections” link on the Home page

Score

Biden -2.5 Trump +1.5

While Theodore Roosevelt often engaged in bellicose rhetoric, his foreign policy while president relied more on negotiation and adroit diplomacy to advance American interests. For example, Roosevelt relied on his diplomatic connections more than military power in avoiding an intervention by Germany in Venezuela to collect overdue debt. TR knew U.S. foreign policy needed to change to adapt to new challenges. In his time, it had to adapt by becoming more active in the world.    

As I mentioned in my posts on the History and Future of Nationalism, the world has changed again. The pursuit of liberal hegemony since the end of the Cold War has been proven to be unsustainable. Meanwhile, the rise of China, Russia, India and other regional powers ushered in a dynamic multi-polar system.  Trump‘s election in 2016 was a repudiation of the liberal model. Much of the change since then has been simply talk, but talk in foreign policy can also be substantive.  Nevertheless, foreign policy remains one of the sharpest contrasts between the two candidates.

Realist Foreign Policy

As I have argued previously, the new National Security Strategy promulgated by Trump in 2018 is one of the most important and least understood changes in modern American foreign policy. It rejects the globalist liberal crusade to spread Western values throughout the world and expressly adopts the realist strategy, which holds that international relations is a contest among nations, especially great powers, and that America’s only foreign policy goal should be to preserve its own national security and way of life. The text has its flaws, but it remains a watershed moment in recent history. Trump deserves a +1 for this achievement. 

In contrast, Biden supported the liberal globalist model in the Senate and as part of the Obama Administration.  There are encouraging signs that some of his current advisors recognize the failures of this strategy as discussed in this article from the DefenseOne website.   However, both Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris still focus on human rights rather than the real economic and geopolitical dangers we face. Thus, a Biden-Harris Administration would most likely return to the liberal model and so deserves a -1 rating. 

NATO Expansion

The American commitment to NATO is based on the post-World War II socioeconomic weakness of Europe in the face of looming Soviet Communist expansionism.  It is past time to reduce our commitment since Europe now has the capability to defend itself against Russian aggression.  President Trump has talked about this, but his substantive policy has been quite the opposite.  Much handwringing occurred when the administration announced the withdrawal of 9,000 troops from Germany. However, instead of coming home, they are destined for redeployment in Poland.  Moreover, we agreed to admit North Macedonia, a tiny remnant of the old Yugoslavia, to NATO, and thus to defend it even though it has no relationship to any real threat to the US.  Trump thus has failed to accomplish anything of substance in this area and deserves a zero.

However, Biden’s stated policy is worse. As the DefenseOne article mentions, he supports releasing Europe from the goal to  increase their defense expenditures to 2% of GDP in exchange for “cooperation” on China and Middle Eastern issues.  This ignores the fact that Europeans have very different views on those issues.  This would allow them to piggyback on our defense support while giving up little in return. It thus earns Biden another -1. 

Withdrawal from the Middle East

Perhaps nowhere has liberal hegemony failed so disastrously as in the Middle East. Rather than attempting to solve its centuries-old intractable problems, we should be supporting the development of an internal balance of power and become simply an offshore balancer (see this previous post). Unfortunately, neither candidate fully embraces this approach. Trump abandoned the JCPOA with Iran that controlled its nuclear development and instead threatened military action.  He has reduced, but not eliminated, the number of combat troops in Syria and Afghanistan.  On the positive side, the administration engineered the recognition of Israel by the UAE and encouraged its tacit alliance with Saudi Arabia. This lays the groundwork for a balance of power in the region between an Arab-Israeli coalition vs. Iran.  However, the lack of strategic coordination between all these policies earns Trump only a zero on this subject. 

Meanwhile, Biden supports trying to renew the JCPOA, but calls Saudi Arabia a “pariah state”.   While supporting military withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Middle East in principle, he then conditions it on effective control of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.  Immigration and economic sanctions would be as effective in preventing them from attacking the US.   Biden’s approach does nothing to achieve a realist solution in the region and thus earns him a zero as well. 

China

China presents a multifaceted geopolitical, trade and domestic challenge to America.  President Xi Jin-Peng’s increasingly totalitarian rule and bid for world power came as a shock to globalist elites. It should not have surprised anyone with any knowledge of Chinese history and culture. President Trump rightly alerted the world to the danger and has successfully controlled some of their influence, notably through his campaign against Huawei. However, he has failed to build the global consensus necessary to effectively contain the threat. He rates a +.5 for his efforts.

In contrast, Biden has minimized the threat and was part of an administration that naïvely coddled China and allowed the US to become dangerously dependent on it.  The DefenseOne article suggests that his advisors now realize these errors and accept the need to respond.  However, given the former Vice-President’s past attitudes, he must be assigned a -.5 on this issue. 

Conclusion

There is no question that there are fundamental differences between the philosophies of the two presidential candidates on foreign policy.  Biden has been part of the globalist establishment for years while Trump has challenged it, though often by word rather than deed.  A future strategy must be based on the realism and restraint – speaking softly, not primarily by force – to be both sustainable and successful in the 21st century world.

Foreign Policy, History and Future of Nationalism

Nationalist Foreign Relations – A History

Bob Claude |

I am insisting on nationalism against internationalism.

Theodore Roosevelt in a letter to Sen. Albert Beveridge

The COVID-19 pandemic has been the globalist’s worst nightmare. Nations scrambled to protect their own citizens first by ensuring that medical supplies and other essential items stay within their borders rather than be traded to the highest international bidder.  It should never have been this surprising.  Even the apostle of globalization Thomas Friedman foresaw this in his paean to globalization “The World is Flat”, when he identified a pandemic as one of the dangers that could halt the phenomenon he praised so effusively.

In fact, the pandemic is actually a stress test revealing the endurance of nationalism as the true basis of international relations.  Rather than inevitably leading to war, a nationalist-based foreign policy can create as stable a world as globalism while also preserving its diversity of cultures. But how do we get there?  This post will begin a series on the history and background of nationalism and the models it provides to achieve the common goal of peaceful international relations.

Origins of Modern Nationalism

Nationalism is hardly a recent phenomenon.  Next to the family, nations are the oldest form of human community.  They arose out of the need to band together for safety and maximize efficiency by encouraging specialized skills.  Nationalism could take the form of nomadic tribal loyalty or simply a commitment to one’s neighbors in a local village or city-state. Eventually, the ties between the members became based on a shared perception of a common ethnicity or culture, enabling them to easily identify in and out groups.  National rivalry and conflict inevitably resulted from these distinctions and has defined much of human history.

Read against this reality, it is easy to dismiss globalism as simply the modern elite’s commitment to hope over experience.  In fact, Western globalism has deep roots and can be traced back to the Roman Empire and the establishment of the Roman Catholic Church. The Romans knit numerous nationalities into a unitary state based on the rule of law that continued in some form for almost two millennia. To Europeans, the Roman world became synonymous with peace and unity. It’s pull on the Western psyche is illustrated by the fact that, after the fall of the original empire in 476 AD, the first successful king of Europe Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 800 AD and a Holy Roman Empire lived in central Europe until the 17th century.  Meanwhile, the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire survived and often dominated the Middle East until it’s fall in 1453. 

After the fall of Rome in the fifth century, the most successful globalist institution in the Western world was the Roman Catholic Church.  In the medieval world, it held not only religious power, but claimed territory and temporal power over rulers.  Its theology taught that all Christendom was to be united in peace under the twin pillars of Empire and Church, though the Church was to be predominant.  In fact, this peaceful unity was rarely, if ever, achieved,  The emperor’s power declined until he became only a titular ruler over the dukes and kings of what later became Germany and Austria.  In an historically accurate gibe, it was said that he became neither holy, nor Roman, nor an emperor.  The Church’s power also was increasingly challenged by medieval and Renaissance rulers.  Despite all this, the idea of a unified religious and secular Christendom survived in local and international law.

The dream of any such unity came crashing down during the 17th Century, when the Holy Roman Empire itself was racked by a brutal religious war between Catholic and Protestant rulers. Known as the Thirty Years War, it remained the deadliest war in European history until World War I. While fought officially by kings and dukes, it was really a religious war fought in the name of Catholicism and the various Protestant denominations adopted by local rulers.  In other words, it was essentially a war between two sets of globalist, transnational institutions.

The exhausted warring powers finally ended the conflict in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia, which created the modern system of international law and relations.  Since globalism caused the war, the treaty established the nation-state as the bulwark for keeping the peace.  The treaty vested religious and secular power in sovereign states and officially ended the Catholic Church’s claim of transnational authority.  States were defined as those entities that had effective governments that ruled within territorial boundaries.  While Europe was no stranger to war in later years, the Westphalian system avoided the indiscriminate killing of the Thirty Years War for over two centuries afterwards. 

The French Revolution and resulting Napoleonic Wars brought back memories of the dangers of globalism to Europe. At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the victorious powers in that war re-established the old system of nation-states, which managed to keep the peace until the beginning of the twentieth century.  The horrors of the two world wars then caused national leaders to question the nation-state as a peace-keeping model and revived globalism as a potential solution. The failures of this solution will be the subject of the next post.