January 10th, 2018
For all his revolutionary talk on the campaign trail, Donald Trump, as presidents have before him, has been co-opted by the U.S. foreign policy establishment to run pretty much the same national security strategy as his predecessors. That is because new presidents, most of them former governors, have been elected on domestic issues and have little foreign policy experience when they take office (the only recent exception was George H. W. Bush), therefore relying on people that the establishment recommends from their political party. In the case of Trump—who had some good commonsense instincts in the campaign that promised a more a more restrained foreign policy—it is a shame that the interventionist generals he has around him have largely won the day over that laudable intuition.
Much to the alarm of establishment figures, Trump initially proved reluctant to accept the NATO alliance’s Article V pledge for the U.S. to defend rich European nations long after the Cold War was over. Even more horrifying to the elite, he agitated for East Asian allies to do more for their own defense, including possibly acquiring nuclear weapons. Trump has been reduced by the generals to merely taking pride that U.S. allies have agreed to pay a little more of the defense bill.
Yet even here, if the traditionally stingy allies cough up a little more and the United States tries to stay out of overseas quagmires, as Trump insinuated during the campaign, why does Trump’s plan call for a big increase in the defense budget. Instead defense spending could be reduced if allies do more and the United States drops its exorbitantly expensive role as policeman of the world. Furthermore, after long being the only federal department that couldn’t pass an audit, the bloated and wasteful Department of Defense finally may be getting serious about conducting one.
In certain instances, the United States could even rely on what the new strategy calls the “revisionist” powers—Russia and China—to ensure stability by policing regions close to them. For example, Russia could be allowed to police a modest sphere of influence in its “near abroad” in Eastern Europe, much as the United States polices its own sphere of influence in the entire Western Hemisphere. Although the American foreign policy elite likes to pretend that spheres of influence are “so yesterday,” this reasoning usually only applies for those of foreign countries, not that of the United States. And if the United States can’t live with a nuclear North Korea and deter it with the most powerful nuclear arsenal on the planet (which it can), as it did when radical Mao Zedong got nuclear weapons in the 1960s, then instead of attacking the North—as seems increasingly likely—why not give a wink and a nod to a surprise Chinese ground invasion of the Hermit Kingdom? A lightning ground invasion of North Korea is the only way to be sure all the North’s nuclear weapons are collected before they can be used. And China, North Korea’s ostensible ally with a common border, is the only country that could conduct a surprise attack on that nation. China could then install a friendly government in the North. However, the American foreign policy establishment would be appalled by the thought of either of these scenarios, because despite severe U.S. overextension abroad, in their view, the United States must remain the global hegemon.
Such American overextension is best illustrated by the United States currently accounting for 37 percent of the world’s military spending, yet only 22 percent of its economic power. If U.S. national security depends on a strong economy, which Trump correctly claims in the new strategy, a reduction in defense spending—in addition to entitlement reform, which Trump has rejected—would help with the humongous debt burden of $20.6 trillion that the U.S. government has already racked up and that the Republicans are ballooning by $1.45 trillion with their needless tax cut in a currently buoyant economy. If Republicans are unimpressed with current economic growth rates, they should remove the drag the current debt induces on them, instead of creating the sugar high of tax cuts that make the debt burden worse. For good reason, General Mike Mullen, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, cogently argued that the nation’s debt was the biggest national security issue facing the country, but Trump and congressional Republicans don’t seem to get the disconnect between Trump’s national security strategy and his economic policy.
Another contradiction in Trump’s strategy is that his “fair trade”—that is, veiled—economic protectionism will ultimately make the American economy, and therefore national security, weaker. In contrast, free trade and capital flows would ensure a healthier U.S. economy in the long term. Therefore, counterintuitively, long-term U.S. national security depends on reducing defense expenditures, entitlement spending, and debt—not cutting taxes until these difficult tasks are completed—and allowing free commerce and capital flows to make the economy stronger.
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May 26th, 2017
By Ivan Eland.
Monday, May 15, 2017 — France, Europe, and the world breathed a sigh of relief after the French elections gave “centrist” Emmanuel Macron a resounding thirty-percentage point victory over “populist” Marine Le Pen, who hated unbridled capitalism and globalization and pledged to provide government protection for French industries, severely curtail immigration, and abandon the European Union. Yet France is not out of the woods yet.
Such “populism,” really proto-fascism in thin disguise, is fueled by economic stagnation. Although the French economy finally has shown a few signs of life after seven years of “recovery,” it still suffers from a high unemployment rate of greater than 10 percent and youth unemployment of almost 24 percent.
Macron’s program to spur the economy is much better than Le Pen’s plan, which might have sent France and Europe into depression, but it still has too much residual resemblance to that of his successor, Socialist Francois Hollande over which Macron presided as Hollande’s economy minister. If Macron doesn’t goose France out its long economic sluggishness, Le Pen may come roaring back with a vengeance.
Macron’s economic plan, which his newly chosen prime minister will implement, calls for a corporate tax cut and the easing of France’s strangling 35-hour work restrictions. So far, so good. Yet Macron also flirts with Hollande/Obama-style policies of the left, which involve yet more government involvement in managing the economy and have not jolted France out of the economic doldrums. For example, Macron proposed a $55-billion stimulus plan that offers government rewards to businesses for hiring people from poor suburbs containing many immigrants and government-sponsored youth job training programs (both also presumably designed to attenuate the home-grown terrorist problem).
However, if Macron wants France’s economy to hum, thus helping to stanch the desire of its people to entertain the further isolation and right-wing socialism of Le Pen-style fascism, he must go further to reduce the massive role of the state sector in French society. Employers remain reluctant to hire new permanent employees, because they must pay heavy social security taxes of as much as half a new staff member’s salary.
Macron wants to lower the costs of hiring permanent employees to spur employment by making Hollande’s short-term payroll tax credit to hire permanent. Although this change would be progress, it’s not enough. Although Hollande made mild labor-market reforms, the massively complex French labor law, designed to make firing employees almost impossible, understandably causes employers’ reluctance to make new permanent hires (almost all new hires in France are only for the short-term at low pay) and must thus experience drastic deregulation. And this issue is just an example of France’s larger problem.
The state sector in France is much too large – a whopping 57 percent of the economy, thus making taxes horrendous. Diverting this much private money into the inefficient state sector is a severe drag on French prosperity. If he is serious about restoring economic sizzle and lessening the chance of a future Le Pen resurgence, Macron must take the politically difficult road of wholesale slaughter on the state sector. Either cutting back around the edges or creating even more government programs to give bonuses to hire in blighted areas or training people for jobs that don’t exist will not work.
Other French presidents were unsuccessful at pruning the state sector, because it is more difficult to take even inefficient government programs away from people than it is to refrain from giving them the goodies in the first place-for example, Republicans in the United States are having difficulty repealing Obamacare healthcare without replacing it with something else.
The bottom line: To permanently nail the coffin of the Le Pen proto-fascist vampire, Macron must first drive in the stake of radical economic reforms to enable a much freer economy in France to flourish
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November 23rd, 2016
By Ivan Eland.
Most Americans voted for Hillary Clinton, but Donald Trump will be the next President of the United States. It’s the second time in the last 16 years, in a country purporting to be the world’s greatest democracy, that a significant oddity has occurred: the triumph of a majority for one candidate in the obsolete electoral college vote over a majority for different one in the popular vote. Before President-elect Trump starts in on his policy agenda, he should push for an amendment to the Constitution to eliminate the electoral college and choose the president based on the national popular vote. Since he and his party derived advantage from the existing system, such a proposal could be powerful as a means to reform the unfair electoral process.
Despite learning in school about the electoral college vote, most Americans are still uncertain about what it is and how it relates to the popular vote. Nowadays, however, intuitively the overwhelming majority does believe that the person who wins the most votes from voters should win the election and that no person’s vote should count more than another’s. Thus, Americans were perplexed in the 2000 and 2016 elections why this didn’t happen, but most passively accept the system as it is.
In the wake of the 2016 election, the American media has open disdain for the “usual” proposals to eliminate the electoral college-perhaps because the U.S. Constitution is so hard to amend. Yet because America is so evenly divided politically now, such majority electoral college/majority popular vote splits are likely to occur more frequently; we have already had two in this young century, equaling the total for the entire 19th century (we had none in the 20th century).
The problem is that in 1787, when the U.S. Constitution’s framers created the document, they had a low opinion of popular democracy, fearing that it would become impassioned “mob rule.” To guard against this threat, they allowed the public some participation in the new system but felt that the country was too vast, and communication and transportation means too slow and unreliable, for the people to be sufficiently informed to elect a president for the entire country. They thus created an electoral college of “experts” who would elect the president instead of the people.
In fact, so the states would have a role in the election of the nation’s president, the framers allowed them to choose the electors in any manner that they desired. Originally, in most cases, the “experts” in the state legislatures picked the “experts” in the electoral college. Each state got to choose a number of electors equal to the number of its delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives (based on a state’s population relative to other states) plus two (the number of senators from each state). Since the framers did not foresee the creation of political parties that could mobilize voters nationally, they believed that regional candidates would not be able to get a majority in the electoral college-thus requiring yet another group of “experts” in the U.S. House of Representatives to choose the president. They believed that this latter method would be the most typical way of choosing the chief executive, but it happened that way only two times at the beginning of the nation’s history.
By the mid-1800s, the people began demanding more voice in their government, turning the connotation of “democracy” from bad to good. Transportation and communication also began to get better, thus increasing the chances that a candidate could get a majority nationally in the popular vote or electoral college. More and more states began allowing voters to directly elect the electors from x or y political party, which is really what the voters, unbeknownst to them, are doing today when they step into the voting booth today. State legislatures bowed out of the selection process for electors.
Proponents of retaining the electoral college talk about preserving the republic (representative government) enshrined in the Constitution, as opposed to popular democracy, or giving the states a role in the presidential election.
Yet the 18th century electoral college concept no longer works as the framers had envisioned it-as a back-up for the House of Representatives electing the president, with electors chosen by state legislatures-and now merely distorts the national popular vote. Forty-eight out of the fifty states plus the District of Columbia allow the winner of the popular vote in their jurisdiction to take all the state’s electoral votes. Also, smaller, rural states are excessively represented in the electoral college at the expense of more populous states with big urban areas. For example, much like the electoral college expanded the political power of smaller rural slave states before the Civil War, in the 2016 election, each voter in Wyoming (the least populous state) had more than double the voting power in the electoral college as a voter in California (the most populous state). This violates the principle of “one person, one vote.”
Proponents of retaining the electoral college want the states to have a role in the presidential election, but nowadays states-instead of letting their “experts” pick the president- automatically take their popular vote and feed it through the distorting electoral college filter, which merely perverts the national popular vote.Even Republicans, who won the election fair and square under the current system but nevertheless benefited from such distortions in this election cycle, had appropriately trashed the electoral college in prior times. In 2012, President-elect Donald Trump had said that the “phoney [sic] electoral college” was “a disaster for a democracy.” Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Ben Carson, both Trump supporters, have also questioned the need for an electoral college.
Because tricks like getting the most populous states to assign all of their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote are politically fragile, even before President-elect Trump starts in on his policy agenda, he should propose a constitutional amendment that eliminates the electoral college and chooses the president based on the national popular vote. Because he and his party benefited from the existing system in 2016, such a long-overdue proposal would likely make a powerful impact.
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November 2nd, 2016
By Ivan eland.
Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, couldn’t catch a break in America, even before the U.S. intelligence community concluded that the Russian government had hacked the Democratic National Committee’s e-mails and had given them to Wikileaks for public release. After Putin’s annexation of Crimea and meddling in the Ukrainian and Syrian Civil Wars, the U.S. government and media long soured on the macho man.
Yes, Putin is an autocrat who snuffed out democracy in Russia and wants to regain some of Russia’s status in the world long after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. Yet the U.S. government, the world champion of unneeded military interventions around the globe since World War II and currently running simultaneous wars in at least seven countries, has little room to talk. In fact, one doesn’t have to like Dictator Putin to make a reasonable argument that the U.S. expansion of a hostile military alliance—NATO—eastward right to the borders of the defeated and downtrodden Russia after the Cold War ended, led to the rise of the nationalist Putin in the first place and compelled him to salvage what he could of his traditional sphere of influence in Ukraine, Crimea, Moldova, and Georgia. As for Putin’s intervention in Syria, he is trying to rescue the even more despotic Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Russia’s only ally in the Middle East and a country not strategic to the United States.
However, generally, Russia is much weaker than its “resurgent” depiction by the American media, which is always willing to find a cartoonishly diabolical villain with which the United States can joust for global supremacy. The Russia has been severely affected by low oil prices—a mainstay of the Russian economy—and Western economic sanctions imposed because of Russian meddling in Ukraine and Crimea. For the first time in Putin’s long tenure as the Russian strongman, the country’s incomes are declining. Much of Putin’s increased bluster overseas might be explained as a distraction from Russia’s ills at home.
The long economic recession will lead to the substantial reduction of Russia’s defense spending by six percent annually for the next three years, at a time when U.S defense spending is beginning to needlessly increase again. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the United States already spends more than six times what Russia does on defense and more than what the next seven highest spending countries combined expend on their militaries—including China and Russia. Also, this vast advantage in American military spending has been cumulative ever since the end of the Cold War, leading to a widening advantage of the U.S. military over other militaries, including Russia’s.
Thus, although Putin has recently exhibited military bluster, it hides military and domestic weakness. For example, with much fanfare, Russia recently sent its single obsolete aircraft carrier (the United States has 10 powerful modern carriers)—the Admiral Kuznetsov—to the Syrian coast to help Assad in his civil war. Yet what was supposed to be an impressive show of force to show that Kremlin is back as a maritime power turned out to be a bit of an embarrassment, because the decrepit carrier, prone to breakdowns, had to be accompanied by an oceangoing tugboat in case of mechanical trouble. The New York Times lampooned the carrier as a “lumbering tub fit for the scrap heap,” “something of a lemon from the start,” and “known more as a threat to its crew than anything else.”
In the long term, Russia faces potential economic decline because of a demographic crisis—as its population ages rapidly. And all the grandiose talk about costly new Russian military bases in Egypt, Vietnam, and Cuba is likely to be a ghost ship that will crash on the shoals Russia’s money problems and the lukewarm response of host countries.
However, despite Russia’s weakness and the general exaggeration of that country’s threat to American security, the U.S. intelligence community believes that to attempt to influence the U.S. presidential election, Putin’s Russia was behind the audacious hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s e-mails and their subsequent distribution to Wikileaks. While Hillary Clinton had previously drawn Putin’s ire for criticizing a Russian election and the United States has a history of meddling in other countries elections (which should stop), any foreign meddling in U.S. elections—critical to America’s system of government—needs to be quickly stanched. Fully defending the vast and decentralized American election system from attack is difficult, but such hacking can be deterred in the future by retaliating in kind on Russia’s computer systems with superior U.S. cyber attacking capabilities. For example, after the U.S. election is safely over, perhaps Moscow’s lights need to be turned off for a couple of days.
An aggressive U.S. posture toward Russia is unneeded—especially in areas not strategic to the United States, such as Crimea, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, and Syria—and, to counter a rising China, general U.S.-Russian relations should be improved, but U.S. elections are too important to the republic to allow Russia or any other country to feel that they can try to manipulate them without retaliation.
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October 25th, 2016
By Ivan Eland.
After World War II, the United States—newly equipped with the ultimate deterrent against attack, nuclear weapons—discarded the model of the nations’ founders, who cautioned against permanent or entangling alliances. The United States created many questionable multilateral and bilateral alliances in which it agreed to defend many countries against worldwide communism, led by its archrival the Soviet Union. The Cold War ended in 1991, with collapse of that adversary, and most of the allies became wealthy enough to defend themselves against the vastly reduced threat. Nevertheless, the alliances remained and became an end in themselves, thus justifying U.S. policymakers’ desire to police the world.
Now, with the “rise” of China and a “resurgent” Russia, which both have limited military capabilities compared to the still dominant United States, some of these allies are trying to flirt with these great powers to get even more goodies from the United States. This shake down mirrors the behavior of small countries during the Cold War, which tried to play off the United States and the Soviet Union against each other for their own gain. Yet the threats to the United States are hardly at the level they were during the Cold War and the United States—militarily overextended with an economy that accounts for only 16 percent of the world’s GDP and a national debt of more than $19 trillion—can no longer afford to pay for the defense of so many nations around the world. Unfortunately, Donald Trump’s valid attempt to point out some of these realities has been deemed as crazy as the rest of his bizarre presidential candidacy. It’s not. Let’s analyze some examples of U.S. attempts to pacify ungrateful and unnecessary allies.
The most egregious example is socialist Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who presides over a poor country with a horribly trained and shoddily equipped military but has called the American President the “son of whore,” compared himself to Adolf Hitler, cozied up to China, and declared a “separation from the United States.” Yet, despite his bombast, he has avoided terminating the 70-year old treaty that binds the United States to defend the Philippines against threats from nearby great powers, such as…well…China. Duterte has also threatened to “go to Russia to talk to Putin.”
Despite China’s recent efforts to woo Duterte, into its orbit and away from the United States, with investments in Philippine infrastructure and other enticements, the top Filipino should remember that the great powers China and Russia are much closer than is the faraway United States and are thus much more likely to cause security problems for Filipinos. In fact, China’s recent assertive behavior in the South China Sea led to its fairly recent grabbing the Scarborough Shoal just off the Philippine coast.
The United States has provided $90 million dollars to help the flagging Philippine military this year and more than $1 billion in non-military support over the last five years, most of it for disaster relief. Yet U.S. acceptance of Duterte’s insulting behavior and flirtation with China arises from the U.S. “pivot to Asia” to contain China. The United States also fears that if the Philippines, traditionally America’s closest ally in the Southeast Asian region, moves toward China, so could all other U.S. allies in the area.
If this chain reaction occurs, so be it. In fact, U.S. security will improve if smaller countries learn to accommodate the great power in their region, thus reducing the chance that they will drag the United States into a war with a nuclear-armed state. U.S. allies in East Asia and elsewhere need to depend less, not more, on the United States for their security. The United States—with vast stretches of water between China and strategic military outposts of Hawaii and Guam in the Pacific, let alone the west coast of the United States—can afford to let China rise peacefully. In the late 1800s, with similarly wide maritime separation, Britain successfully did the same with the rising United States.
And China is the country with the greatest potential to compete with the United States in the future. Russia, despite its apparent resurgence, has only a shadow of the Soviet Union’s military strength and must depend on revenues from oil to prop up its economy—problematical if oil prices stay low for the future, which seems likely. Yet the Turks, a NATO ally, are flirting with Russia to try to get concessions from the United States in neighboring Iraq and Syria. The Turks are mad that the U.S. is using their archrival Kurds to fight ISIS in Syria, even though few other ground forces exist to use and even though the Turks originally helped ISIS to flourish in Iraq and Syria by looking the other way while the group’s militant fighters, weapons, and funds flowed across their borders with those nations. The Turks also want a greater role in taking back Mosul, Iraq so that they can better dominate events there.
Turkey should be cautious in its flirtation with Russia, which includes the resumption of a suspended natural gas pipeline and allowing the Russians to bid on providing an air and anti-missile defense system, because neither will erase its centuries-long rivalry with this massive nearby country. Turkey already tried to buy a Chinese system and was told that it could not be integrated with air defense and intelligence systems of the U.S.-led NATO, an alliance pledged to defend Turkey against…well…Russia.
Finally, the U.S. has backed Saudi Arabia in its war against Houthi rebels in Yemen—with intelligence, air refueling, military planning, and arms sales— to assuage Saudi anger about an international agreement in which its archrival Iran agreed to severely limit its nuclear program. However, U.S. officials have been nervous that selling arms to assist the indiscriminate Saudi war in Yemen could implicate the United States in war crimes against civilians. Besides, limiting Iran’s nuclear program helps nearby Saudi Arabia even more than it does the faraway United States. All such U.S. policies have benefitted an informally allied government that soon may be sued by 9/11 families for its alleged role in the worst attacks on the continental United States since the War of 1812.
In conclusion, the United States should not allow its allies to fuss or flirt with other great powers to enhance the already sweet deals they are getting from “Uncle Sugar.” With vast ocean moats, weak and friendly neighbors, and the most potent nuclear arsenal in the world, true U.S. security has never depended on the United States pledging to defend ungrateful faraway countries—only maintaining an outdated, expensive, and overextended informal global American Empire requires such foolish pledges of blood and treasure
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October 14th, 2016
By Ivan Eland.
Sadly, for Americans, both candidates’ views on US policy to Syria are misguided and even dangerous.
Although a hawkish Hillary Clinton promised in Sunday’s debate
not to use American ground forces in the Syrian civil war, she didn’t seem to count US Special Forces or military trainers already on the ground in the region. Even more troubling, she still backs a “no-fly zone” in Syria, apparently in part to obtain leverage in negotiations with the Russians over the troubled country’s future. She would also ramp up assistance to the Kurds and target the leader of the ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Of course, all this promises a gradual escalation, a la Vietnam, for the same reason — competition with Russia over a nonstrategic, backwater country. When these initial US actions fail to have the desired US outcome — whatever that is — such escalation will likely become necessary because “we can’t let cocky Vladimir Putin humiliate the world’s superpower.” Such escalation might be more dangerous than it was in Vietnam; the creation of a US no-fly zone might cause American aircraft to come into direct and overt hostile contact with those of a nuclear-armed nation
The Cold War has been over for a quarter-century and Russia is only a shadow of the Soviet Union, yet old rivalries and ways of operating die hard. The Russians care more about Syria than does the United States — and should — because that country is the only ally they have left in the Middle East. Yet the US government regards Russian boldness in Syria as threatening US global dominance.
It is difficult to limit competition with Russia over Syria when the US foreign policy establishment sees the situation through these lenses — the way it was with American involvement in Vietnam when the US-Soviet rivalry loomed. And the reality is that if the United States gets dragged into a third quagmire, this time in Syria (Iraq and Afghanistan alone have cost between $4 trillion and $6 trillion) and if the domestic entitlements and debt crisis continue at home, the United States might no longer be able to afford, in the long term, being a superpower.
But even if we don’t get rid of the despotic Syrian leader, Bashar al-Assad, don’t we still need to vanquish ISIS?
Despite Donald Trump’s troublingly superficial knowledge of policy, his occasionally fresh set of eyes do see somewhat clearer than Clinton’s on some issues. His reflexive and seemingly content-free “tough-guy” desire to “
crush and destroy ISIS” is accompanied by the correct observation that in the past, the United States has assisted rebels who turned out to be worse than the regime the United States was opposing. He used the example of the rebels trying to overthrow Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi, but one could also add Jimmy Carter’s and Ronald Reagan’s aid to Islamist militants fighting the Soviet-backed communist Afghan government during the Cold War in the 1980s — militants who ultimately became the perpetrators of the catastrophic 9/11 attacks.
With that in mind, Trump is convincing in his suggestion that more arms for opposition groups in Syria could end up in the wrong hands, an outcome likely in a multisided, chaotic civil war in which the most ruthless groups have so far been more successful.
If Trump had stopped there, his Syrian policy would have made some sense. However, he said that Russia and its allies Assad and Iran were fighting ISIS. Trump has also advocated having better relations with Russia to combat ISIS. Recognizing that Russia has legitimate security interests, not regarding every issue as a Cold War-like competition between the United States and that nation, and having better relations with the Russians would be a good policy simply to avoid a nuclear war and to counter a rising China. But it is important to remember that Russia, Assad, and Iran have the primary goal of keeping the brutal Assad in power. They are nominally fighting ISIS, but in reality have been trying to decimate other opposition groups first.
The Obama administration made the mistake of getting involved in Syria in the first place; a new president who is smart would use the change in administrations to get out before the quagmire deepens.
Ultimately, Trump is right that US allies in the Middle East need to do more to combat what is primarily an ISIS threat to that region. But when your adversaries — Russia, Assad, and Iran against ISIS and al Qaeda — are getting bogged down and are being kept busy killing each other, why get in their way?
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September 21st, 2016
As President Obama gave his valedictory speech to the United Nations General Assembly and recently returned from a farewell tour of East Asia, it sure seemed like other countries were dissing him. Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines—a small, poor country that has a territorial dispute with China in the South China Sea and depends on the U.S. military to defend it—launched a personal profane diatribe against Obama not usually used in diplo-speak. Obama’s response was to cancel a formal meeting with Duterte, but then the next day met with him informally anyway. The Chinese insultingly refused to provide a stairway for the president to exit Air Force One when he arrived in China, making him exit through his own stairway at the back of the aircraft. Obama was also reluctant to press small Asian countries—such as Vietnam, Laos, Malaysia, and the Philippines—on human rights, for fear these countries will be driven into China’s orbit.
And the problem is not confined to East Asia. Media reports always seem to paint Obama as being hoodwinked and disrespected by Vladimir Putin of Russia—for example, by his brazen annexation of Crimea, his meddling in eastern Ukraine, and his military intervention in Syria to help his ally Bashar al-Assad. And concerning Syria, Obama has been belittled around the world and at home for drawing a red line on Assad’s use of chemical weapons and then not enforcing it.
Yet the problem is not so much that Obama is personally weak as is it that the United States has been debilitated by the lack of a global grand strategy—that is, the country has a muddled vision of what it wants to or can sustainably do in the world. The United States still tries to operate as the world’s policeman, yet is overextended—accounting for 38 percent of global defense spending but only 16 percent of its GDP—and has a national public debt of more than $19 trillion. And U.S. foreign policy remains stuck in the Cold War, as it attempts to woo allies in East Asia to contain a rising China and to continue to expand NATO in Europe to contain a reawakened Russian bear. Thus, as during the Cold War, smaller countries can extract goodies from competing big powers, which simultaneously try to entice and intimidate these lesser players.
Using this Cold War-lite strategy, the United States and its president are thus likely to do some things half-heartedly—such as leaving a small force in Afghanistan while hoping somehow the war will be turned around even though success was elusive at much higher force levels, reinserting a small number of U.S. forces back into Iraq and facing the same problem, and making only a nominal effort to bomb in Syria and provide aid to opposition groups there to pretend to keep up with the Joneses (Russians). The reason all of these efforts are half-baked is because the world’s policeman and its citizens have been exhausted by two lengthy quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, an attack on Libya, and drone wars in many other counties that just keep…well…droning on.
With an overextended empire, the worst thing to do is be half in and half out of interventions, but that is all of the effort that can be currently mustered. As Fredrick the Great, one of the greatest commanders in military history, once said, “To defend everything is to defend nothing”—meaning that no military has enough resources to defend everything effectively and that choosing where to fight is the key to victory.
Therefore, what if the United States—to return resources to the private economy and thus ensure its status as a great power for decades to come—decided to retract its defense perimeter and abandon its role as the first line of defense against regional powers, such as China and Russia? Our rich allies in East Asia and Europe could band together to be the first line of defense against these powers, respectively. The United States could then become the “balancer-of-last resort” if either of these regional powers turned aggressive and tried to take over its respective region. This strategy worked during World Wars I and II and better fits America’s intrinsically secure situation oceans away from the world’s centers of conflict than does the expensive world’s policeman strategy that the United States adopted from the end of World War II to the present.
If the United States drew firm lines about what it would defend and when, then China and Russia would have no gray areas to test U.S. resolve—for example, in countries not strategic to the United States, such as Syria or Ukraine. In addition, U.S. leaders would get a lot more respect from those of other nations, because those small countries would be currying favor with the United States in case their big neighbors got out of hand rather than being able to play one great power off against another. In other words, as many single people have found over the millennia, you get treated better if you play hard to get.
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September 14th, 2016
By Evan Eland.
FILE, GEDEON AND JULES NAUDETFrom CBS special on World Trade Center. Footage captured by two French filmmakers who were working on a documentary about firefighting the day of the attack.
Fact is, terror has never been that big a threat, and would be smaller still but for our Middle East meddling.
Every year, on the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the media asks the same question: Are we safer now?
The answer, often given by homeland security experts and military commentators on TV, always seems to be, “Yes, but . .”
These talking heads, while wanting to report the progress their professions have made in combatting evil, have a vested interest in describing terrorism as a menacing, very real threat. They want to do more interviews, after all.
But sensational TV news is far from reality. The average American is more likely to be struck by lightning than to be killed in a terrorist attack.
Many Americans, witnessing global terror events from the comfort of their living rooms, make the understandable mistake of thinking terrorism poses them an imminent threat. Statistical experts call this phenomenon “probability neglect.”
In actuality, if an individual wants to live a long life, he should forget about terrorism and wear his safety belt, exercise, eat healthy foods and refrain from smoking. Mundane things like greasy burgers pose a statically greater threat to American citizens than terrorism.
Since 2001, 282 U.S. citizens have, on average, been killed each year in acts of terrorism committed around the globe. The nation’s population is more than 300 million.
Further, the country, intrinsically secure because of the oceanic moats separating it from centers of world conflict, has always been difficult for terrorists to reach. This was true before 9/11 and remains so today.
The killing power of terrorist groups – even today’s well-endowed Islamic State – pales in comparison to that of vastly wealthier and better-equipped nation states.
The one thing Americans should be concerned about when it comes to terrorism is not terrorists; it’s our government’s meddling in foreign affairs.
Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, of all people, understands this, having argued during his nomination acceptance speech that the U.S. ought to abandon its unneeded, expensive and counterproductive policy of overthrowing unfriendly dictators and performing nation-building throughout the Middle East.
The roots of al-Qaida began growing during the administrations of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, both of which funded radical Islamist fighters against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Then, George H.W. Bush incensed Osama bin Laden by needlessly leaving American troops in the Muslim holy land of Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf War against Saddam Hussein had ended. When his son George W. Bush after 9/11 insisted al-Qaida had attacked America because of its freedoms, bin Laden angrily retorted, noting his group had primarily attacked because of America’s Middle Eastern interventions, including its support of Arab dictators who abused their people. After the attacks, the younger Bush did exactly what bid Laden wanted: He overreacted and invaded Iraq, an action that ultimately led to the creation of the brutal Islamic State.
All this is not meant to justify what was a horrendous, unjustified attack. But it is meant to illustrate why the U.S. government should quit making people take off their shoes at the airport and focus instead on reducing its footprint in the Muslim world.
Doing so will make the chances of blowback terrorism occurring even more remote.
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August 30th, 2016
Lately, the tactics of local police departments have been in the news because of mass shootings at Orlando and Fort Myers nightclubs, questionable police killings of civilians in suburban St. Paul and Baton Rouge, and retaliatory slayings of police in Baton Rouge and Dallas. Some commentators have argued convincingly that the militarization of police departments has caused the use of aggressive policing, which has in turn spawned counter-violence, resulting in the death of innocent police officers.
In the recent orgy of violence, one notable incident of police militarization was the jury-rigged bomb used in Dallas to kill a shooter of police. The police used C-4, a powerful military-grade explosive, that was attached to a police robot, normally used defensively to safely dispose of bombs, to offensively attack and kill the shooter. The use of such a questionable tactic was overshadowed by the deaths and funerals of the innocent slain officers.
Although before detonating the bomb, the Dallas police thought they had cleared the college building in which the shooter was sheltering; unbeknownst to them, students remained in the building. Also, in addition to the higher possibility of killing innocent bystanders than by killing the shooter with expert marksmen from a SWAT team, an even bigger danger of using a bomb is starting fires that can spread uncontrollably. In 1985, police in Philadelphia—seemingly the only other time in U.S. history that police have used a bomb against holed up criminals—dropped an explosive device from a helicopter on a house occupied by the Move group. The raging fire that ensued destroyed more than 60 homes over a multiple block area in that city.
Commentators have argued convincingly that the militarization of police departments has caused the use of aggressive policing, which has in turn spawned counter-violence, resulting in the death of innocent police officers.
The Dallas police chief defended using the robot-delivered bomb by saying that he would have done anything to avoid more police deaths. That is understandable reasoning but flawed, because although lives of professional law enforcement personnel are very important, the use of such indiscriminate battlefield weapons may unreasonably endanger the lives of the innocent citizens the police are sworn to protect.
Under the rules of war, militaries are permitted to kill civilians or destroy their property, even if such collateral damage is deemed likely before an attack, if the target is militarily critical. That reasoning is unacceptable for police departments, given their primary mission of protecting the public. The militarization of police with SWAT teams, armored vehicles, etc. is threatening enough to citizens’ liberty without the unnecessary use of military-grade explosives to endanger the civilians whose welfare they are supposed to be safeguarding.
And if the police are being militarized at home, the military has lately been used as a police force overseas. Instead of fighting other uniformed armed forces, the U.S. military has been bogged down in fighting police actions against non-uniformed guerrilla forces, which attack and then blend back into the population. As the U.S. military gradually learned during the Vietnam War and has had to painfully relearn in the quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq, the use of the heavy firepower, normally used against regular foreign armies, is counterproductive against elusive guerrillas. The more civilians that are killed, the more the rising rage among the local populace leads to the recruitment of additional guerrilla fighters from their midst. Thus, eventually in all three wars, the military was forced to adopt what are called counterinsurgency (COIN) tactics, which have a primary goal of protecting the local population and even wining their “hearts and minds,” rather than simply killing guerrillas. If this sounds like what a police force would do, it is.
In my recent book, The Failure of Counterinsurgency: Why Hearts and Minds Are Seldom Won, I explain why these less aggressive COIN tactics have a better chance of succeeding when fighting guerrillas than simply blasting away with heavy firepower. Yet historically, even COIN tactics usually have failed because foreign police forces and social workers—essentially the roles the U.S. military is assuming in such conflicts—rarely have the local legitimacy to tame and even remodel faraway countries with vastly different cultures from that of foreign occupiers. And such overseas bogs have worn out the military and also impeded it from training to fight uniformed foreign armed forces in conventional battles, which are still the biggest threat to U.S. security. Thus, the best solution is to avoid such brushfire wars—usually in places in the developing world not very important to U.S. security—which require the use of such police tactics.
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August 18th, 2016
By Ivan Eland.
Wednesday, August 17, 2016 — Turkey’s recent flirtation with Russia, by mending fences, is designed as a signal to the United States, its major NATO benefactor, that Turkish ire is up over perceived lukewarm Western support for its broad domestic crackdown after the recent failed coup attempt. In addition, the Turks are angry that the U.S. government has not quickly extradited Fethullah Gulen, who lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania and whom they accuse of fomenting the coup. The excessively wide purge in Turkey-resulting in the firing of 60,000 military, judicial, governmental, and educational personnel and the arrest of 16,000 alleged coup participants-has been designed to get rid of Gulen supporters in key positions.
Mevlut Cavusoglu, the Turkish foreign minister said that NATO hadn’t satisfied Turkey and that it needed to look elsewhere-read Russia-for more defense cooperation. Yet U.S. ambivalence toward the coup and President Tayyip Erdogan’s subsequent crackdown is justified. Although a military coup is almost never a good thing, the massive purge by Erdogan, already demonstrating prior autocratic tendencies, will skew Turkey toward authoritarianism anyway. And U.S. extradition of Gulen back to Turkey without hard evidence that he had engineered the coup would violate the rule of law, which the United States still has but which is rapidly eroding in Turkey.
Even before the coup occurred, Erdogan had rekindled the civil war with Kurdish separatists in Turkey’s southeast to overcome his own weakness in an election. In addition, over recent years, Turkey has been a bad U.S. ally by allowing radical Islamist fighters (including those of ISIS and al Qaeda), their military supplies, and funds to flow across its southern border and into the Syrian civil war; Erdogan has been trying to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al Assad, a former friend.
Also, although Russia has been accused in Syria of targeting moderate rebels opposing its ally Assad, instead of bombing ISIS, the Turks have received no public criticism from the United States for doing something similar. Syria’s Kurds have been one of the few groups in that country to fight ISIS, but the Turks have put a higher priority on bombing them than on fighting that brutal organization.
Only recently, after ISIS began attacking targets in Turkey did the Turks tighten controls on a still porous border and allow the United States to bomb ISIS in Syria and Iraq from the Incirlik air base in southern Turkey near the Syrian border.
Turkey is flirting with Russia because it is unhappy with the United States, much as backwater developing countries tried to play off the two superpowers against each other during the Cold War. Turkish-Russian relations sank to a new low when the Turks shot down a Russian military jet, which was supporting Assad in the Syrian civil war. In response, Russia imposed sanctions on tourism to Turkey and on Turkish exports to Russia. However, now that Erdogan has apologized for the aircraft downing and made a visit to Russia, the two powers are snuggling closer together with increased military cooperation.
This development should probably not bother Washington as much as it probably will. If the United States didn’t want to continue to run the world and didn’t regard leading the obsolete NATO alliance as one way to do it, the Turks would soon discover that they needed the United States a whole lot more than the U.S. needed Turkey. Turkey lives in a bad neighborhood and doesn’t get along with Assad in Syria, has potential conflicts with the Shi’i governments in Iraq and Iran (Turkey is Sunni), and despite its recent rapprochement with Russia, has had centuries of conflict with that large, close, and traditionally imperial neighbor. However, Syria is not strategic to the faraway United States, and thus Turkey’s Incirlik base is not as vital as it seems. Unlike an al Qaeda that focused on attacking the “far enemy” (the United States), ISIS initially concentrated on attacking the “near enemies” near Iraq and Syria. ISIS didn’t begin beheading Westerners or accelerating attacks on European targets (ISIS has a difficult time directing attacks in the United States) until the U.S.-led coalition (including European nations) began bombing it in the Middle East.
Thus, the United States would have a lot more leverage on Turkey if didn’t care as much about running the world through NATO or meddling in the distant Syrian civil war.
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