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FOREIGN POLICY

Trump’s Jerusalem Declaration Long Overdue by John R. Bolton

President Trump’s announcement Wednesday that the United States would recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital was both correct and prudent from America’s perspective. Much more remains to be done to relocate the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, but this was a vital first step.

What is now critical is implementing Trump’s decision. Will the State Department actually carry out the new U.S. policy — which State’s bureaucracy strongly opposed — or will the entrenched opponents of moving the embassy subvert it quietly by inaction and obfuscation?

In 1948, the United States, under Harry Truman, was the first country to recognize the modern state of Israel upon its declaration of independence. Nonetheless, Truman, at the State Department’s urging, declined to acknowledge Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, a mistake continued by his successors. Trump has now corrected this error: Jerusalem has been Israel’s capital since 1948, and the sooner the American flag flies over the American embassy there, the better.

The expected protests and violence from the usual suspects in the Middle East have already begun, and more can be expected. Fear of these protests has deterred prior administrations from moving the embassy to Jerusalem. But it is wrong for America to bend to such efforts to intimidate us. Congressional support will be overwhelming, as it should be; over 20 years ago, the House and the Senate legislated almost unanimously that the president should relocate our embassy to Jerusalem. Given the inevitable bureaucratic obstructionism, however, Congress must continue playing an important role — by constantly prodding the State Department and by providing prompt and adequate funding for building a first-class new embassy.

Who’s Playing Politics on Israel? Liberals accused Trump of putting politics above diplomacy when he recognized Jerusalem as the Jewish state’s capital. Pot, meet kettle. By Jonathan S. Tobin

As far as the New York Times was concerned, it was simply a matter of fact: The only possible explanation for President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel was politics, pure and simple. A front-page news article proclaimed as much in its headline: “For Trump, an Embassy in Jerusalem Is a Political Decision, Not a Diplomatic One.”

The piece claimed that the move was more or less hatched in a meeting Trump held ten days before his inauguration with billionaire casino owner Sheldon Adelson and Zionist Organization of America president Morton Klein. At the meeting, Trump reaffirmed the promise he had made during the campaign to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Since all of his predecessors had reneged on the same promise, as far as the Times was concerned, the only possible reason for Trump to even consider keeping it was a fear of disappointing donors like Adelson and fervently pro-Israel base voters.

This thesis makes sense if you believe no rational president would ignore the collective wisdom of the foreign-policy establishment, but it has two basic problems. One is that it fundamentally misunderstands Trump’s view of the world and governing style, as well as the truth about the current standoff in the Middle East peace process. The second is that it ignores an even more obvious element of the new debate over Jerusalem: The president’s opponents are playing politics here as much as he is.

Was there a political benefit to Trump’s keeping his promise on Jerusalem? Of course. But while Trump seems to think more about the need to honor his campaign promises than most career politicians, everything he’s done since entering politics suggests that being broadly popular is not his primary concern.

Instead, it seems far more likely that the decision stemmed from Trump’s contempt for the conventions of policymaking. His instincts almost always lead him to distrust the experts and actively seek out the advice of dissenters from the conventional wisdom. This can often get him in trouble, but in this case, it alerted him to a basic fact that his predecessors’ deference to the experts caused them to ignore: The traditional approach to the Arab–Israeli conflict, which dictated a refusal to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, has been an abysmal failure.

A Foreign Policy for ‘Jacksonian America’ Sen. Tom Cotton has a worldview—even a doctrine—that is hawkish and realistic, though tinged with idealism. By Jason Willick

At 40, Tom Cotton of Arkansas is the youngest member of the U.S. Senate. He was called a young man in a hurry four years ago when he announced, during his first and only term in the House, that he would challenge the incumbent senator, Mark Pryor. Now there is talk President Trump may nominate him to lead the Central Intelligence Agency as part of a national-security shake-up. Admirers have also suggested he is presidential timber.

I met Mr. Cotton this week in his Capitol Hill office to explore his foreign-policy thinking. What emerged was the outline of a coherent if contentious worldview—one might even call it a doctrine—that begins with a sense that U.S. foreign policy has been adrift for a quarter-century.

“The coalitions of the Cold War rapidly began to break down as soon as the Soviet Union dissolved,” Mr. Cotton says. That first became clear during the debate over the Balkan wars of the Clinton years. “You had some Cold War hawks that were all of a sudden sounding like doves,” Mr. Cotton says, referring to conservatives who’d been staunchly anti-Soviet but were wary of U.S. involvement in what was then Yugoslavia. “You had Cold War doves”—including the liberal humanitarians of the Clinton administration—“that were beginning to sound like Teddy Roosevelt, ready to charge up the hill. That pattern consistently repeated itself” in subsequent years.

When it comes to America’s present challenges—from Iran to North Korea, China to Russia, Syria to Ukraine—Mr. Cotton, a conservative Republican, is squarely on Team Roosevelt. “There is always a military option,” he says. “That is the case everywhere in the world.”

But he believes that the lack of a clear organizing principle for how and when to use that power has knocked America’s global strategy off kilter. It also has created a divide between foreign-policy elites and what Mr. Cotton calls “Jacksonian America”—heartland voters who favor a strong national defense but are skeptical of foreign entanglements and humanitarian interventions.

“Foreign policy, to be durable and to be wise, must command popular support,” Mr. Cotton says. Statesmen and diplomats “might craft what they think is a wise foreign policy—something that Metternich or Bismarck might draw up in his study,” he continues. “But without the support of Jacksonian America, the people who are going to cash the checks that are written by elites in New York and Washington”—that is, to pay the price for intervention—“no foreign policy can ultimately be successful.”

On that score, he thinks the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations all fell short. “Some of the interventions over the last 25 years, I think, have been plainly unwise and had very limited popular support, and they’ve created foreign-policy disasters,” he says. As a prime example, he cites the desultory 2011 air campaign in Libya, whose aftermath is now “destabilizing Europe and creating new terrorist breeding grounds.” President Obama, Mr. Cotton argues, “probably did the wrong thing” in helping to oust Moammar Gadhafi while leaving Bashar Assad alone. If the U.S. had intervened in Syria and not Libya, “we might have had a happier end in both.”CONTINUE AT SITE

Trump Tells Arab Leaders U.S. Will Move Embassy to Jerusalem The move could scuttle plans to launch an Israeli-Palestinian peace plan By Felicia Schwartz and Dion Nissenbaum Rory Jones

Despite appeals and warnings from world leaders, President Donald Trump is poised to reverse decades of U.S. policy on Wednesday by declaring Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and beginning the process of moving the U.S. Embassy to the holy city, a step that threatens to spark unrest across the Middle East and undermine American efforts to forge a new peace plan.

Mr. Trump placed a flurry of phone calls to Arab leaders Tuesday, on the eve of a policy address in which he plans to explain the move, and fielded protests from Arab, Palestinian and European leaders to his plan, according to foreign officials. The State Department, meanwhile, warned U.S. embassies around the world to prepare for possible protests and violence and banned travel by government employees and their families to Jerusalem’s Old City and the West Bank.

The U.S. will delay the actual embassy relocation for now to address logistical and security challenges, officials said, but U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital also will come as a potent diplomatic step with implications for regional peace. CONTINUE AT SITE

Congressman: Is U.S. ‘Serious’ About Going After Iranian Airline Shuttling Weapons, Terrorists? By Karl Herchenroeder

WASHINGTON – A gap in sanctions policy against Mahan Air, which Iran has used to traffic weapons and terrorists, has put Americans and the world in danger as the airline is freely operating in major European airports, Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) told Treasury Department officials Thursday.

Mahan Air has been designated as a terrorist organization, given its support to the Assad regime in Syria. The airline, which is regarded as the Quds Force’s aviation arm, enjoys significant traffic through airports in Milan and Munich, allowing Iran to connect foreign flights to the United States.

“Why are we allowing European air carriers to start their flight at Mahan-infested airports and come to the United States?” Sherman asked during a Financial Services Subcommittee on Monetary Policy and Trade hearing. “Why are we not going after the airports, or are we serious about Mahan Air?”

While questioning Treasury’s Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing Marshall Billingslea and Director for the Office of Foreign Assets Control John E. Smith, Sherman asked why American companies are still doing business with airports that accommodate Mahan and why American airlines are still purchasing fuel from the same companies that deal to Mahan.

Billingslea responded that in a departure from the Obama administration, the Trump administration has been “incredibly” aggressive in trying to alter European relations with Iran. Smith noted that the Treasury Department has implemented some designations against European airlines in the past few months, most notably Ukraine International Airlines, which has discontinued some of the troublesome flights routes.

To Billingslea’s point that this administration has altered the previous approach, Sherman said that the Treasury Department is “setting a very low bar.”

“At least we cleared the bar, right?” Billingslea asked. “But I think you make a good point, and it would be very prudent for any company that transacts with Mahan Air to be exceptionally cautious going forward.”

“I don’t think they should be cautious,” Sherman said. “I think you should nail them.” CONTINUE AT SITE

What Will It Take to Get Serious About Missile Defense? By Angelo Codevilla

North Korea’s possession of mobile-launched missiles that can deliver nukes anywhere in the United States shows that, nowadays, anybody can make lots of pinpoint-accurate missiles of any range. Since America’s ICBMs, submarines, and bombers are fewer, concentrated in fewer places than ever, even North Korea can carry out the kind of disarming attack that Americans feared the Soviet Union might have mounted in the 1980s. Kim Jong-un is showing the world that the missile defense programs into which the U.S. government has poured some $80 billion in recent years are no barrier to destroying most U.S. strategic forces and holding the American people hostage.

The officials who crafted these programs, ideologically focused as they have been on not hindering Russia’s or China’s capacity to devastate America, built token defenses to suffice against unsophisticated, unserious opponents. But North Koreans, semi-starved and serious, grasped better than highly credentialed Americans how this focus makes U.S. defenses inherently vulnerable. Yet, because U.S. policy continues to be one of not having missile defense—the public’s support for it notwithstanding—the government’s response to its programs’ failure is to pour more money into them.

The Technology is Not Lacking
Since the 1960s, the government and elite opinion have obfuscated that policy by pretending that technology is lacking. Hence, support for missile defense has meant spending endlessly on expensive tokens and endless “research.” Yet, as ballistic missiles have evolved since the 1950s, America has never lacked the technical means of defending seriously against them. As Professor Joseph Constance’s magisterial work showed, Republicans and Democrats have avoided responsibility for critical choices on these matters by framing them in pseudo-technical terms, none too subtly telling the public that they are beyond ordinary people’s understanding. Nonsense.

What follows summarizes how current programs are irremediably inadequate to defend against any serious missile attack from anywhere, and what a missile defense worthy of the name requires.

The current “National Missile Defense” (NMD) system consists of a single radar/fire control system plus a maximum of 44 interceptors based mostly in Alaska that purports, or rather pretends, to defend U.S territory. This arrangement so increases the distance that the interceptors must travel and so shortens the time in which the interceptors must do it that the interceptors have to be huge. Moreover, because the system’s designers chose to require that the interceptors collide with the incoming warhead directly—without the aid of any warhead—the guidance system must be exquisite and fragile. Such requirements make these interceptors hugely expensive and doubtful of success. Current “employment doctrine” calls for devoting two interceptors to each incoming warhead. In short, this system is un-expandable.

Caroline Glick :The State Department drops the ball By Caroline B. Glick November 27, 2017 21:26 By reversing course on closing the PLO mission, and groveling to the threatening PLO, the State Department made a laughingstock of the US and President Trump.

Over the weekend, The New York Times published its latest broadside against US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson for what the newspaper referred to as his “culling” of senior State Department officials and his failure to date to either nominate or appoint senior personnel to open positions.

But if the State Department’s extraordinary about face on the PLO’s mission in Washington is an indication of what passes for US diplomacy these days, then perhaps Tillerson should just shut down operations at Foggy Bottom. The US would be better off without representation by its diplomats.

Last week, in accordance with US law, Tillerson notified the PLO’s Washington envoy Husam Zomlot that the PLO’s mission in Washington has to close within 90 days because it has breached the legal terms governing its operations.

Specifically, Tillerson explained, PLO chief and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas breached US law when he called for the International Criminal Court to indict and prosecute Israeli nationals during his speech before the UN General Assembly in September.

Tillerson explained that under US law, the only way to keep the PLO mission in Washington open is if US President Donald Trump certifies in the next 90 days that its representatives are engaged in “direct and meaningful negotiations” with Israel.

The PLO didn’t respond to Tillerson with quiet diplomacy. It didn’t make an attempt to appease Congress or the State Department by for instance agreeing to end its campaign to get Israelis charged with war crimes at the ICC. It didn’t put an abrupt end to its financial support for terrorism and terrorists. It didn’t stop inciting Palestinians to hate Israel and seek its destruction. It didn’t disavow its efforts to form a unity government with Hamas and its terrorist regime in Gaza.

It didn’t join Saudi Arabia and Egypt in their efforts to fight Iranian power and influence in the region. It didn’t end its efforts to have Israeli companies blacklisted by the UN Human Rights Committee or scale back its leadership of the international boycott movement against Israel.

Maximum Pressure on North Korea China and the U.S. still haven’t imposed the toughest sanctions.

Kim Jong Un tested a new intercontinental ballistic missile in the early hours of Wednesday, and the data suggest it could hit all of the continental United States. If North Korea is allowed to perfect its warhead technology, it will be able to hold the U.S. hostage to nuclear ransom. The Trump Administration is right that the U.S. can’t live with this threat, so what more should it do to prevent it?

Conventional wisdom says that Pyongyang already faces extreme economic and diplomatic pressure. But in reality the United Nations and U.S. only began to impose broad sanctions last year, and even U.S. allies such as Singapore and Thailand have been slow to enforce them. China and Russia continue to support the Kim regime—China through oil exports and other commerce, and Russia through payments for North Korean slave labor.

Shutting down those lifelines should be a top priority. After the North’s intermediate-range missile launch in September, the U.S. circulated a draft resolution at the United Nations Security Council to do just that. But Russia and China resisted and the U.S. caved; Resolution 2375 only capped oil exports and labor contracts. The Trump Administration portrayed the unanimous vote at the U.N. as a victory, but the resolution kept open many of Pyongyang’s cash lifelines.

The U.S. even rewarded Beijing for the vote by pausing the process of sanctioning Chinese companies that violate sanctions. That pause ended last week when the Treasury Department put four companies based in the Chinese city of Dandong on its financial blacklist. Treasury is playing catch-up with a June report on sanctions-busting firms by the private research group C4ADS. The U.S. government continues to hold back on other “secondary sanctions,” especially against Chinese banks, for fear of losing Beijing’s cooperation.

But China’s internal enforcement of sanctions is patchy. Chinese banks froze the accounts of some North Korean customers while continuing to finance Chinese companies that are breaking sanctions rules. Imports of coal from North Korea have continued in violation of a U.N. resolution in August that banned all trade in North Korean coal. The Trump Administration can make an example of these firms and expose Beijing’s failure to honor its sanctions promises.

The U.S. response to Wednesday’s missile tests should also include security measures. The redeployment of tactical nuclear weapons to South Korea is needed to deter a nuclear attack from the North. Showing Pyongyang that American forces would retaliate overwhelmingly to an attack on a U.S. ally, even at the risk of an ICBM attack on the U.S. mainland, would help prevent Kim miscalculating.

The deployment of more Thaad missile-defense radars and launchers to South Korea would send a strong signal to China that its support for Pyongyang has consequences. At the end of last month Beijing bullied South Korean President Moon Jae-in into freezing deployment of the Terminal High-Altitude Air Defense system. But the U.S. should insist it needs new Thaad units to defend its own forces and deter attacks from the North.

The U.S. and South Korea can also expand their programs to encourage North Koreans to defect. The Kim regime’s former Deputy Ambassador to the U.K. Thae Yong-ho has good ideas on how to do this. Mr. Thae, who fled to freedom in the South last year, testified to Congress last month on human-rights messages that will resonate in the North.

A Post ISIS Middle East Without A Strategy By Herbert London

The much discussed “Shiite Crescent” or an Iranian land corridor from Tehran to the Mediterranean may be a reality. To make matters even more complicated, U.S. policy or the lack thereof may have contributed to Iran’s regional hegemony.

After President Trump assumed office, he indicated a primary policy of defeating ISIS. Uniting U.S. Special Forces with Iraqi troops and Qud Revolutionary soldiers, the caliphate was destroyed including the stronghold in Raqqa and its last foothold in Syria’s Dair Ezzor province. The problem in the aftermath of these battles is that a plan for the future has not been forthcoming. In fact, the Iranian role in the defeat of ISIS elevated its stature and influence.

If the U.S. is serious about countering Iranian aggression, steps must be taken across this regional battle space. Should the Trump administration do nothing – a likely response – the Iranian Revolutionary Forces will assert political and economic dominance over the entire northern tier of the Middle East.

The last remaining obstacle to the realization of Iranian goals is a coalition of Syrian Kurds and Arabs known as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Kept apart at present by a U.S. Russian confliction channel, both sides are securing critical territory. The question that remains about Trump’s Syria policy is whether it was designed to defeat the Islamic state or whether it is informed by the larger strategic view of Iran’s regional dominance. If the latter, President Trump must decide how and when he will deploy American troops as a counterweight to the Iranian surge. United States air power and Special Forces remain at the center of a capable combat force. Using these assets effectively Washington can assure SDF partners that it will remain in Syria even after Islamic State is defeated.

Finally, the U.S. and allies in Europe and the Gulf hold tens of billions of dollars in international assistance that Syria will need to recover from the Civil War. The U.S. also contends Assad must go and the basic rights of minorities, especially the Kurds, must be guaranteed. In order for these aims to be achieved the Iranian and Shia proxies in Syria must be displaced.

Surely this will not be easy since it involves new risks and costs. But doing nothing is costly as well. President Trump should articulate a strategy that boldly announces the U.S. opposition to the Shia Crescent with a ground game that consciously works to block Iranian hegemony in Iraq and Syria. To do less is to invite a war between Israel and Hezbollah – a proxy of Iran – and to cede vast control of strategic positions to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

Trump Brings Foreign Policy Back to Earth The goal now is less to make dreams come true than to keep nightmares at bay. By Walter Russell Mead

Forget the tweets, the gaffes and the undiplomatic asides. The most trenchant criticism of President Trump’s foreign policy is that it risks forfeiting America’s hard-won position of global leadership.

It’s a compelling indictment: Mr. Trump is withdrawing from the Paris Accord, “restructuring” the State Department with a chain saw, dumping the Pacific trade deal, and abdicating on human rights while cozying up to authoritarians. The whole of the damage being done to America’s standing is greater than the sum of his tweets.

On the other hand, those hardy souls who defend the administration argue Mr. Trump is so smart that his critics can’t fathom the method to his apparent madness. The naysayers, as this theory has it, are playing checkers, while Mr. Trump is winning at chess.

The truth, as always, is more complicated. Mr. Trump is not the second coming of Bismarck, and his temperament, education and experience have not prepared him to steer American foreign policy at a difficult time. But there is a pattern if not a method to his moves. Moreover, Mr. Trump’s mix of ideas, instincts and impulses is not as ill-suited to the country’s needs as his most fervid detractors believe.

What gives Mr. Trump his opening is something many foreign-policy experts have yet to grasp: that America’s post-Cold War national strategy has run out of gas. During the period of confidence and giddy optimism that followed the Soviet Union’s fall, the list of “important” American foreign-policy goals expanded dramatically.

Promoting democracy in the Middle East; protecting the rights of religious and sexual minorities; building successful states from Niger to Ukraine; advancing global gender equality; fighting climate change: This is only a partial list of objectives recent administrations pursued, sometimes under pressure from congressional mandates. Foreign policy has become as complex and unwieldy as the tax code, even as public support for this vast, misshapen edifice has withered.

Change had to come, and the failure of Mr. Trump’s 2016 rivals—both Republican and Democratic—to offer a less disruptive alternative to gassy globalism helped put him in the White House. Although the president’s antiglobalist and mercantilist instincts blind him to some realities, they enable him to grasp three significant truths.

First, Mr. Trump knows that the post-Cold War policies can no longer be politically sustained. Second, he knows that China poses a new and dangerous challenge to American interests. Third, he sees that foreign policy must change in response. The old approach—on everything from trade and development, to military deployments and readiness, to religious freedom and women’s issues—must be reassessed in the light of today’s dangerous world.

For years foreign-policy thinking was dominated by the idea that the end of the Cold War meant the “end of history”—the inevitable triumph of the so-called liberal world order. This belief shaped a generation of intellectuals and practitioners.

But history isn’t over, and American foreign policy needs to come back to earth. The U.S. isn’t putting the finishing touches on a peaceful global system that is fated to endure for the ages. For the foreseeable future, foreign policy is going to be less about making dreams come true and more about keeping nightmares at bay. CONTINUE AT SITE