Category Archives: International Relations

Why the Pivot to Asia Makes No Sense

1 Reply
Asia - Satellite image - PlanetObserver

Asia – Satellite image – PlanetObserver (Photo credit: PlanetObserver)

“America’s Pivot: One Big Contradiction”
Justin Logan
The Diplomat
January 25, 2013

I rarely discuss the topic of China in this space, for a couple of reasons. First, I discuss it at length in other fora, most often in Silicon Hutong and The Peking Review. Second, I think there are enough other more pressing topics to debate when it comes to the future of the U.S. Occasionally, though, I need to make an exception, and in this case Justin Logan’s thoughtful critique of our China policy demands I do so.

The Asia pivot fails three critical tests. First, it is a failure to match ends with means. The U.S. military lacks the doctrine, forces, and resources to fight and win even a limited conflict in the region, and appears to lack the will to create them within the current and looming constraints on budgets.

Second, it exposes latent hypocrisy, the failure of our rhetoric to match our reality, and thus it undermines our credibility. We say the shift has nothing to do wit China, when in everyone’s eyes, including those in the Pentagon and their opposite numbers in Beijing, it has everything to do with China. In Logan’s words, “if the success of America’s Asia policy relies on China’s elites believing our official rationale, the policy is in trouble.”

He’s absolutely right. And when we promulgate official rationales for policies that are blatantly at odds with reality, our global influence is shot in the foot.

Finally, the Asia Pivot demonstrates a lack of strategic imagination. Given the challenges America faces both at home and abroad, and given the priorities the government must now face as the nation ages and our infrastructure demands upgrades, global forward engagement of a rising hegemon is simply unsustainable. What is more, it encourages our allies to behave as free riders on a system we are creating.

The wisest choice for the US would be to forgo the neo-containment approach of the Pivot. Instead, we should revert to a posture that allows China enough rope in the region to prove itself a hegemon, thus inciting other countries in Asia to take greater responsibility for their own defense and for the balance of power in Asia.

The current administration is on the firing line for this approach, but this is not a partisan issue. It is, instead, a generational change in strategic focus, and if the current administration does not make the necessary choices, it will be left for successors to clean up the mess.

Related articles

Bull Moose Foreign Aid Policy

2 Replies
English: Berliners watching a C-54 land at Ber...

English: Berliners watching a C-54 land at Berlin Tempelhof Airport, 1948. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In order to deliver effective assistance to people in need around the world, we need to adhere to three principles.

First, we need to recognize that foreign aid is not politically sustainable when America’s own social safety net is frayed, broken, or has turned into a hammock for those unwilling (as opposed to unable) to step away from public assistance. Charity begins at home, so let’s put Americans first in all instances.

Second, we still contend that people everywhere would rather have a hand-up than a handout. Our foreign assistance programs should be focused on locally-relevant projects designed to promote long-term self-sufficiency and economic development, not dependency without a deadline. Any outright aid should come with a deadline. Everything else should be left to NGOs.

Third, we should prioritize our help on those countries where the right amount of aid will make the difference between success and failure. Somalia is not our model: the Berlin airlift is.

Related articles

The Reconstruction Myth

1 Reply

“Imperial Reconstruction”
Peter Van Buren
The American Conservative
August 16, 2012

Twenty-four year State Department veteran Peter Van Buren issues a damning screed against the neocon conceit that reconstruction is about remaking countries in our own image.

I’m going to pick up Van Buren’s book. The idea that post-war reconstruction should be about remaking countries to look like mini-USAs is not a new one, but it finds its roots in the idealism of the Kennedy administration, and it has become a meme of the Neoconservatives. The approach stands in marked contrast to the way we undertook reconstruction in conquered and/or devastated nations after World War II. Say what you want about MacArthur in Japan and the occupation of West Germany, the polities that emerged in those countries in the 1950s were born of a democratic self-image that we enabled rather than foisted upon them.

We were as horribly prepared, both in terms of worldview, doctrine, and assets, to engage in national reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, as we were in South Vietnam, Somalia, Haiti, and the Balkans. Something is broken. Whether it is in the conceit that we can rebuild nations in our image or whether we can rebuild them at all is the question.

I remain a subscriber to Thomas P.M. Barnett‘s approach to multi-agency efforts to improving the lot of failed states, but I think we need to recognize that our failure to un-fail those states needs to be thoroughly examined before we engage in any further missionary activity.

The largest problem, and the one that seems to set our post-WWII efforts apart from our post-1960 efforts, is that we have allowed our ideologies to get in the way. We have made it our goal to export democracy rather than to put into place a government that can start feeding, clothing, housing, and employing its people first.

What is more, we have to get private enterprise off of the battlefield and out of the reconstruction business. I am no fan of big government, but shifting some burdens to private enterprise makes the more costly and less accountable, and that undermines our own democracy, not to mention or well-intentioned efforts on the ground.

Read Van Buren’s article and see what you think.

Related articles

Iran in Perspective

Leave a reply

 

ayatullah khamenei

ayatullah khamenei (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“The Most Dangerous Man in the World”
Patrick J. Buchanan
The American Conservative
August 17, 2012

Pat Buchanan and I have not always agreed, but I was impressed by his rebuttal to The Weekly Standard‘s scare-tactic essay on Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that named him “the most dangerous man in the world.” Pat puts Iran’s leaders into perspective, noting that they are no where near as dangerous as the frightening combination of Nikita Khrushchev, Mao Zedong, and Curtis LeMay. As for modern times:

And if we should fear this most dangerous man in the world, why do not the Iraqis, Turks, Azerbaijanis and Pakistanis, his neighbors, seem to fear him? The Paks, with scores of nukes, seem less nervous about Iran than democratic India, with whom they have fought
several wars.

As an American and a Jew, I’m not about to invite Khamenei, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or any of their closest friends to a dinner party at my place anytime soon. But there are threats aplenty in the world today, and by focusing on one we are blinding ourselves to what might be the real threat, and in the meantime creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The way to deal with Iran is realpolitik, not ideology. That is the only approach that will keep the region at peace, Israel safe from a new threat, and America out of a new war.

Related articles

The Enemy We Need?

Leave a reply
David Rothkopf

David Rothkopf (Photo credit: New America Foundation)

In Foreign Policy, David Rothkopf offers one reason we are looking to turn America’s relationship with China into the next Cold War.

Many in the United States have a rampant, untreated case of enemy dependency. Politicians love enemies because bashing them helps stir up public sentiment and distract attention from problems at home. The defense industry loves enemies because enemies help them make money. Pundits and their publications love enemies because enemies sell papers and lead eyeballs to cable-news food fights.

I have lived in and dealt with China long enough to know that we should not delude ourselves about that country or its intentions. This is a relationship unlike any we have known in recent history, at once a market, a resource, and a competitor with whom we share a mutual dependency. We are confused about how to deal with them, and they with us.

China may well wind up being our enemy at some point. But we serve ourselves poorly by creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. There is a fine line between wise preparedness and reckless provocation. Our debate should be on where that line is, and once decided we should step right up to it – but not across.

Related articles

It’s Our System, Not China’s Cheating

Leave a reply

China’s Not the Big Trade Cheat Harming America’s Domestic Economy – Print View – The Daily Beast.

Zachary Karabell at The Daily Beast takes strong exception to Mitt Romney‘s characterization of China as the big villain in Main Street’s economic downturn. While I suspect Karabell’s partisan motives and disagree with some of his premises, I do agree with this point:

But in terms of pure competitive advantage, all of the many American freedoms and cultural incentives to be innovative, be entrepreneurial, build a business, or go to college to create a career do not change one iota the sclerotic inability of government to urgently and productively invest for the common future. American government did that for the middle years of the 20th century to great effect, and even in smaller ways in the 19th century. No longer.

Karabell stops short of mentioning the name of Dwight Eisenhower, but that is who he is talking about.

Related articles

Philippine Group Protests US-Filipino War Games

Leave a reply
Maritime claims in the South China Sea

Maritime claims in the South China Sea (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

U.S. Plays Philippines War Games | ASEAN Beat.

Fresh from a standoff with the Chinese in the South China Sea, the Philippine government is trying to figure out how to incorporate the US in its defensive shield.

Meanwhile, the Philippine left is playing games:

“Renato Reyes of the leftist group Bayan summarized the opposition to the entry of U.S. soldiers in the Philippines: “The U.S. wants it known that it is still top dog in this region, to the great dismay of many peace-loving peoples in Southeast Asia. We do not want our country to be used as a U.S. outpost and playground. We are not a laboratory for U.S. drone wars. We do not want the U.S. meddling in our internal conflicts and regional issues. We do not want the Philippines acting like the U.S. troops’ doormat in the region. We do not want U.S. troops using our country as their Rest and Recreation destination of choice.”

We’ll see what tune Mr. Reyes is playing when Luzon becomes the 32nd province of China. Or maybe he’s already cut a deal with his future overlords?

Related articles

American Decline is in the Mind

Leave a reply
Cover of "American Power in the 21st Cent...

The Sky Is Not Falling | The National Interest Blog.

The editors of The National Interest take understandable exception to Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen’s contention that Obama is a “closet declinist.” They protest that Cohen’s examples do not demonstrate the president’s supposed mindset. Their point is fair: Cohen’s case was incomplete, and it seems negated by the president’s own words in his last State of the Union address:

Anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

The real point (and the one that Cohen probably would have preferred to have made if his editors weren’t in search of link-bait,) is that the meme of American declinism is an insidious force in U.S. politics, an idea that can be used to justify all sorts of pet policies and that can quickly become an accepted fact even before we have had a chance to debate or disprove it. Indeed, it can seep into the core assumptions of any politician – President Obama included – and become a part of our thinking before we know it. What concerned me about the president’s remarks is that by even acknowledging the argument of the declinists, he is giving the argument way more credit than it deserves, and placing the question of national decline on the global agenda in a very high-profile way.

Comfort to our Enemies

This is bad, because the idea that America is on the decline, that America is Rome, carries great danger.  In the best case, if America’s national power is not in decline, believing that it is gives courage to our rivals and enemies and breeds uncertainty among our friends, and engraves our invitations to more conflict, not less. In the worst case, even if we are, the belief accelerates the process.

From Whence it Comes

The decline meme is the result of several forces coming together at once including the realization that our military power alone is inadequate to wreak change in the world; the falloff in the positive perceptions of the US overseas; the shift of manufacturing jobs from the US to Mexico and Asia; and the brutalizing effects of the global financial crisis and the role our vaunted system of neo-laissez-faire capitalism played in it. As Robert Kagan noted in his much-linked but pay-wall-protected essay “Not Fade Away” in The New Republic,

“Americans look at other nations whose economies are now in better shape than their own, and seem to have the dynamism that America once had, and they lament, as in the title of Thomas Friedman’s latest book, that ‘that used to be us.’ ”

A New Kind of Power

Such simplistic thinking on the part of American leaders and much of the electorate obscures what is really happening. Joseph Nye offers what I think has been the most balanced and cogent look at the question of American power in the 21st century in his essay “The Future of American Power” in Foreign Affairs, and the shorter companion op-ed piece he wrote for The Wall Street Journal at around the same time. Nye notes that:

It is time for a new narrative about the future of U.S. power. Describing power transition in the twenty-first century as a traditional case of hegemonic decline is inaccurate, and it can lead to dangerous policy implications if it encourages China to engage in adventurous policies or the United States to overreact out of fear. The United States is not in absolute decline, and in relative terms, there is a reasonable probability that it will remain more powerful than any single state in the coming decades.

Nye, I think hits quite closely to the mark. It is not that American power is in decline, it is that the world is growing beyond single-power hegemony to a more multilateral planet of empowered nations. That’s not decline: it is merely a shift to a state that the world has not seen since before the Cold War, or perhaps since the Congress of Vienna in 1815: a multipolar political system.

In such a world, Nye points out, American leadership is not assured, but it is not foreclosed, either. The nature of that leadership must change. While we have been able to exert our position by virtue of absolute dominance in the past 60 years, the time has now come for us to learn to do so in the context of relative strength.

It is time for us to learn those lessons, to abandon the rhetoric of decline, and to take on the rhetoric of leadership in a multilateral system.

An American Ambassador

1 Reply

The new Ambassador of the United States in China, Gary Locke, has by dint of personal example begun to force ordinary Chinese to question the elitist manner in which many of the nation’s public servants conduct themselves. Locke has acted with humility, spoken with warmth and generosity, and has been unflappable in confrontational situations.

His behavior reminds me of a quote from Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, a late 20th-Century American Jewish leader, who wrote as America became the world’s sole superpower:

The world waits to see if our message is to pursue the easy gratification promoted by our pop culture, or to abide by the basic principles that have built our nation’s character. Simply put, is all that we are selling Coca-Cola and Rock music. America was founded on principles of justice, freedom, tolerance, generosity and hard work. [From In G-d We Trust: A Handbook of Values for Americans, 1996]

Locke’s predecessor as ambassador, Jon Huntsman, seemed to be the first US ambassador in a long time to realize that a high-ranking emissary is not just the de jure representative of his home government, but a de facto representative of his people and his culture, and made a conscious effort to be that American everyman. Locke has, intentionally or otherwise, taken that approach far enough to capture the imagination of ordinary Chinese.

I hope this is the beginning of a trend, and I hope it extends beyond Beijing. We need ambassadors who are not only politically acceptable and professionally capable, but who also represent those things we cherish the most in our country.

Related articles