China, Foreign Policy, New Nationalism News, Realist Theory

New Nationalism News

April 17, 2021

Afghanistan Withdrawal

President Biden’s announcement of our withdrawal from Afghanistan by September is correct for the simple reason that we achieved our objective of defeating Al Qaeda and killing Osama Bin Laden, as I previously argued. Even if the Taliban regain power, we can control any threat through immigration, trade and other sanctions. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/14/us/politics/biden-afghanistan-troop-withdrawal.html

War with China & Russia?

Meanwhile, this article raises the possibility that China and Russia would coordinate attacks on Taiwan and Ukraine.  However, it also argues against American military intervention in either war.

USS Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group in South China Sea

We still need to show that the US will defend our interests and allies in Asia. Thus, the USS Theodore Roosevelt is currently executing a Freedom of Navigation Operation (FONOP) in the South China Sea to challenge China’s militarization of this shipping lane in clear violation of international law.   

https://www.cpf.navy.mil/news.aspx/130841

The Myth of a Rules-Based Order

When I was in China, the Shanghai Admiralty Court trumpeted the fact that China had signed the International Law of the Sea Treaty in contrast to the US.  Chinese militarization of the South China Sea in clear violation of the treaty shows, as this article says, we live in a world of great power rivalry and not the globalist dream of a rules-based order.   

https://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2021/04/12/the_myth_of_a_rules-based_world_772304.html

2020 Election, Foreign Policy, Politics, Realist Theory

An American Nationalist Voting Index – Speaking Softly

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, Realist Theory

The Historical Myths of Globalism

Nationalist Foreign Relations – A History, Part 2

Our duty is to the United States…We should be friendly to all nations, and in any crisis we should judge each nation by its conduct in that crisis. We should condemn the misconduct of any nation, we should oppose its encroachments upon our rights with equal vigor…..according to what it actually does on the given occasion with which we have to deal.

Theodore Roosevelt, America for Americans, Afternoon Speech in St. Louis, MO; May 31, 1916

In November of 2018, French President Emmanuel Macron delivered what was billed as a stinging indictment of nationalism.  In lofty poetic language, Macron expressed the European elitist view that the two world wars were caused by the pursuit of nationalism and implied that only transnational global institutions such as the European Union could keep the peace and preserve “universal values”.  At the same time, the speech betrayed this theme by arrogantly claiming these values were uniquely French in origin. Indeed, it was a speech Napoleon himself, a past advocate of spreading “superior” French values, could easily have given to justify the wars of conquest France unleashed on Europe in the early nineteenth century.

Unfortunately, President Trump did not have the appreciation of history and international relations theory to effectively defend nationalism from Macron’s globalist stereotype. This defense could have started with a recitation of the wartime horrors of the Thirty Years War and the Napoleonic Wars, both waged in the name of values claimed to be universal at the time.  It then would have pointed out that it was the realistic preservation of the basic national goal of sovereignty that kept the peace after Napoleon and then highlighted the real reason for the breakdown of this peace by 1914. 

A good source for this defense can be found in former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s 1954 book “A World Restored”, which recounts how the eventual victors in the Napoleonic Wars crafted a system that avoided continental war in Europe for almost a century.  Kissinger believed in the realist theory of international relations, which says all nation-states, whether democratic or autocratic, are naturally driven to maximize their power to preserve their sovereignty and survive in an essentially anarchic world. In contrast, the policy of liberal hegemony followed since the end of the Cold War is the Macron and Napoleonic dream of developing transnational institutions to reduce national sovereignty by spreading and, if necessary, imposing by force, the democratic capitalist model throughout the world.

For a brief periods of time, the French Empire of Napoleon and his coerced allies seemed to produce peace, but could not completely stamp out the national dreams of the different ethnicities and cultures of Europe. At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the foreign ministers of Britain, Austria-Hungary and France set out to construct a realist international system that preserved this diversity.  They did so by creating a balance of power among their nations in Europe that controlled the drive to maximize power and risk war. During that period, the main continental powers of France, Russia, Austria and later Germany would all enter into shifting alliances with and against each other while Britain remained in “splendid isolation” from these rivalries.  If one alliance grew too powerful to the point of risking conflict, Britain would intervene to balance the relative power and prevent a conflict.  It was an elegant diplomatic waltz that succeeded in avoiding all-out war during the rest of the nineteenth century.

The rise of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany and decline of Austria-Hungary upset this balance and forced Britain to expressly ally with France and Russia in response to the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria and Italy. The balancer was now gone, and Europe experienced a series of crises provoked by Germany. Enter Theodore Roosevelt and the United States, which briefly acted as a balancer and brokered a peace in a 1905 crisis involving Morocco, as shown in the above cartoon from the time.  Historians still wonder whether the First World War might have been avoided if TR had won the 1912 election and America had continued to serve the role of a balancing power.  Instead, Woodrow Wilson won and appointed the isolationist William Jennings Bryan as Secretary of State, who strongly opposed any involvement in Europe. In the end, the US could not remain aloof, but entered the fray only after war had raged for three bloody years. Wilson’s League of Nations was supposed to prevent another war, but it’s globalist dreams proved to be useless against the expansionism of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

Thus, the lessons of 1815 –  1945 are quite the opposite of Pres. Macron’s florid rhetoric. Peace is possible in a nationalist system so long as states avoid being trapped in rigid alliances that are not flexible enough to account for changes in relative national power. As TR said above, America and all nations must be free to identify and pursue their national interests and preserve their own culture according to the particular circumstances. Instead, alliances like the European Union (and NATO as well) freeze the international system into outdated alliances that do not adjust to the times and then try to justify their continued existence by exalting the alliance over its members.  This creates tension between nations instead of alleviating it. The only sustainable route to peace is to accept the diversity of nations and insure there is a balancing nation that can intervene and prevent conflict.

Wilson’s mistake also proves that nationalism is also not the same as isolationism.  Macron attempts to conflate the two to buttress his argument when, in fact, the balance of power system of the nineteenth century depended on Britain and then America becoming involved with other nations when necessary. In the modern age of ICBMS, climate change and pandemics, isolationism has never been an option and no one, including Trump, has seriously said otherwise. A nationalist system can address transnational problems so long as each nation’s sovereignty and interests are respected.  The next post will show how this can be successfully done.