RUTHFULLY YOURS

The aftermath of the Cold War has seen the emergence of what neocon gurus Robert Kagan and William Kristol have called “benevolent global hegemony” of the United States. Throughout this period, key figures of both major parties have asserted that America’s unchallengeable military might was essential to the maintenance of global order. This period was marked by military interventions in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and (less overtly) in Syria. Each violent exercise of hegemony was validated by the rhetoric of “promoting democracy,” “protecting human rights,” “confronting aggression,” and by the invocation of alleged American exceptionalism.

That bipartisan consensus was codified in the official strategic doctrine. George W. Bush’s 2002 National Security Strategy declared that the U.S. would “extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent,” and—furthermore—bring about an end to “destructive national rivalries.” The Obama Administration’s 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance (“Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense”), which is still in force, claimed that the task of the United States was to “confront and defeat aggression anywhere in the world.” Such continuity of utopian objectives reflected the chronic refusal of the policymaking community in Washington to establish a rational correlation between strategic ends and means, or to see America as a “normal” nation-state pursuing limited political, economic, and military objectives in a competitive world.

As a result, one major source of instability in contemporary global order is the tendency of the most powerful player to reject any conventionally ordered hierarchy of American global interests. Traditional foreign policymaking may be prone to miscalculations (e.g. Vietnam), but in principle it is based on some form of rationally adduced raison d’etat. Deterritorialized strategy of full-spectrum dominance, by contrast, had its grounding in ideological assumptions impervious to rational discourse. It consistently creates outcomes—in Iraq, Libya, etc.—which are contrary to any conventional understanding of U.S. security interests.

Over the years, American “realists”—who accept that the world is imperfect, that violence is immanent to man, and that human nature is immutable—have often lamented the absence of grand-strategic thinking within the U.S. foreign-policy establishment. For the past quarter-century at least, successive administrations have displayed a chronic inability to deploy America’s political, military, economic, and moral resources in a balanced and proportionate manner, in order to protect and enhance the country’s rationally defined security and economic interests. Washington’s bipartisan, ideologically-driven obsession with global primacy (“full-spectrum-dominance”) has resulted in a series of diplomatic, military and moral failures, costly in blood and treasure, and detrimental to the American interest.

The 2016 presidential election, on the subject of foreign affairs, seemed to confront two polar opposites. On November 8, it appeared that Donald Trump, an outsider victorious against all odds and predictions, had a historic opportunity to make a fresh start. The moment was somewhat comparable to Ronald Reagan’s first victory in 1980. Reagan used grandiloquent phrases at times (notably the “Evil Empire”), but in practice he acted as an instinctive foreign policy realist. Likewise, Trump’s “America First” was a call for the return to realism based on the awareness that the United States needs to rediscover the value of transactional diplomacy aimed at promoting America’s security, prosperity, and cohesion in a Hobbesian world.

Some resistance from the upholders of hegemonistic orthodoxy was to be expected, as witnessed even before Trump’s inauguration by the outgoing administration’s frantic attempts to poison the well on every front possible. Giving up the neurotic desire to dominate the world, and recognizing that it cannot be shaped in line with the bicoastal elite class “values,” was never acceptable to the controllers of the mainstream media discourse and the government-subsidized think-tank nomenklatura. More seriously, some key components of the intelligence, national-security and military-industrial conglomerates proved effective in resisting Trump’s attempt to introduce traditional realist criteria in defining “interests” and “threats.”

Hillary’s World—Hillary Clinton was a leading exponent of the hegemonistic consensus. In 2002 she voted in favor of the Iraq war, the greatest foreign policy disaster in recent American history. In 2011 she tipped the balance within the Obama Administration in favor of the Libyan intervention, with devastating consequences for Libya, the region, and the world. She was the first major political figure in the world to compare Vladimir Putin to Hitler. She routinely saw military power as a tool of first resort: In the Obama cabinet she had been “the most hawkish person in the room in every case where she was in the room in the first place.” According to her aides, she subscribed to “a textbook view of American exceptionalism.”

Clinton’s strategic vision was a “known-known” of the 2016 campaign: open-ended global commitments in pursuit of hegemonistic goals. During the campaign she still advocated providing arms to the “moderate” Syrian rebels, which in reality meant further enabling non-ISIS jihadists supported by Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Her speech at the American Legion National Convention (August 31, 2016) was an exultant restatement of the doctrine of global hegemony. “The United States is an exceptional nation,” she declared,

“and is still the last, best hope of Earth . . . And part of what makes America an exceptional nation, is that we are also an indispensable nation. In fact, we are the indispensable nation. People all over the world look to us and follow our lead . . . [W]e recognize America’s unique and unparalleled ability to be a force for peace and progress, a champion for freedom and opportunity . . . U.S. power comes with a responsibility to lead, with a fierce commitment to our values . . . [W]hen America fails to lead, we leave a vacuum that either causes chaos or other countries or networks rush in to fill the void.”

Clinton’s triumphalist vision reflected the post-Cold War consensus, to which both ends of the Duopoly subscribed with equal zeal. Bipartisan consensus which she embodied prompted many establishment Republicans to support her. The continuity of duopolistic key assumptions, and the escalation of risks and tensions resulting from their application, was clearly predictable in case of her victory.

Donald’s Vision—Trump’s strategic concepts seemed less ideologically coherent than Clinton’s, but he was more rational in espousing his stated guiding principles and certainly more “realist” in policy detail. In the early days of his candidacy he repeatedly asked why must the United States be engaged everywhere in the world and play the global policeman. He raised the issue of NATO’s utility and core mission, a quarter-century after the demise of the USSR which it was created to contain. He even suggested creation of a new coalition in order to put America’s resources to better use, especially in the fight against terrorism. He repeatedly advocated rapprochement with Russia. He criticized the regime-change mania of earlier administrations, pointing out the “disastrous” consequences of toppling Saddam Hussein in Iraq. He said that he would leave Syria’s Bashar al-Assad well alone and focus on degrading the Islamic State.

Recently, two announcements regarding Afghanistan and the Arab-Israeli conflict suggested that the Trump administration is following the old failed strategies for dealing with the challenge of modern jihadism. If so, he is setting us up for the same old failures caused by the same old failure of imagination.

First, Trump announced a bold plan for dealing with Afghanistan, that 16-year-old conflict now in its third presidential administration. He set out an ambitious aim: “From now on, victory will have a clear definition — attacking our enemies, obliterating ISIS, crushing al-Qaida, preventing the Taliban from taking over Afghanistan and stopping mass terror attacks against America before they emerge.” He clarified that he would not make the mistakes of past administrations: no nation-building, no announcements of troop levels or withdrawal dates, no restrictive rules of engagements.

So far so good. But he also hinted that a diplomatic solution would be sought: “Someday, after an effective military effort, perhaps it will be possible to have a political settlement that includes elements of the Taliban and Afghanistan, but nobody knows if or when that will ever happen.” And he added that given such uncertainty, “America will continue its support for the Afghan government and the Afghan military as they confront the Taliban in the field,” suggesting that the war will continue indefinitely.

Yet all this depends on adding an unspecified number of troops, perhaps 4,000, whose mission will be mainly to support and train the Afghan army––pretty much what’s been going on for years. How this mini-surge will work when Obama’s surge of 33,000 soldiers in 2009––which raised the total number of troops to 100,000 by 2010––didn’t, isn’t quite clear. Prissy ROE and micromanagement from D.C. alone can’t account for that failure.

Worse, soon after Trump’s announcement, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson undercut Trump’s “We will always win,” by saying “We are there to facilitate and ensure that there is a pathway for reconciliation and peace talks. As the pressure begins to take hold, we believe we already know there are certain moderate elements of the Taliban [sic!] who we think will be ready and develop a way forward.” Even more astonishing, after he said the Taliban “will not win a battlefield victory,” he went on, “We may not win one, but neither will you.” Contra Trump, Tillerson implies that we are not fighting to destroy the enemy, but to “begin a process, a lengthy process, of reconciliation and a peace accord in Afghanistan.”

Once again, the delusions of diplomatic settlements take precedence over destroying the enemy and those who harbor him. I guess people have forgotten that LBJ’s similar strategy of fighting the North Vietnamese just enough to bring them to the negotiating table was a complete failure.

Meanwhile, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has asked Mahmoud Abbas and Palestinian Arabs “to hold back on their threat to take unilateral diplomatic initiatives against Israel for a period of some four months, in exchange for an American commitment to submit a comprehensive diplomatic plan within that time frame to advance the diplomatic process,” as World Israel News reported. Trump plans to meet Abbas at the UN is September, where he will present his “road map for peace.” According to a White House statement, “Both sides agreed to continue with the US-led conversations as the best way to reach a comprehensive peace deal.” But they deny the quid pro quo of Palestinian constraint for a comprehensive plan.

Once again, the shibboleths and clichés generated by decades of diplomatic failure are passed around, despite the overwhelming evidence that the Palestinian Arabs are not interested in “two peoples living side-by-side in peace,” and use negotiation and complaints of “settlements” as a tactic in their “stages” strategy for destroying Israel. Meanwhile the terror continues, the incitement starting in preschool trains the next generation of “martyrs,” and the PA uses danegeld from the West to subsidize the families of jailed or killed terrorists.

The Zionist Organization of America’s August 2017 report detailed US National Security Chief General H.R. McMaster’s troubling record regarding Iran, Israel and radical Islamist terrorism. McMaster’s statements and actions appear to be diametrically opposed to President Donald Trump’s support for Israel, opposition to the Iran nuclear deal and determination to name and combat radical Islamist terrorism.https://www.algemeiner.com/2017/08/27/name-calling-critics-fail-to-refute-zoas-concerns-about-mcmaster/

Critics of ZOA’s report have failed to show that ZOA’s report was wrong in any substantive respect. The criticisms have amounted to name-calling against ZOA, and McMaster’s friends vouching for his character — which is irrelevant to the vital policy issues addressed in ZOA’s report.

McMaster reportedly wrongly refers to the existence of a Palestinian state before 1947 — when no Palestinian state ever existed, and maligns Israel as an “illegitimate,” “occupying power.” In fact, Israel’s re-establishment in 1948 and her self-defensive capture of Judea/Samaria (West Bank) in 1967 were both legal under binding international law, and deprived no country of its sovereign territory.

McMaster wrongly claimed that President Trump would recognize “Palestinian self determination” during his visit to Israel; reportedly opposed President Trump’s visit to Jerusalem’s Western Wall, refused to state that the Western Wall is in Israel, and insisted that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could not accompany President Trump to the Western Wall.

NATO must stand for Western values. Vladimir Putin’s shameful “Zapad 17” military exercise, in regions bordering the eastern democratic lands of NATO and…

And alarmingly, when Israel installed metal detectors at Jerusalem’s Temple Mount after Palestinian terrorists smuggled in firearms and murdered two Israeli policemen, McMaster, according to a senior defense official, described this as “just another excuse by the Israelis to repress the Arabs.”

In his short tenure at the National Security Council (NSC), General McMaster has fired or removed from the NSC six staunchly pro-Israel/anti-Iran officials: Steve Bannon; K.T. McFarland; Adam Lovinger; Rich Higgins, Derek Harvey and Ezra Cohen-Watnick.

On the matter of an outcome in Afghanistan after 16 years of fitful war, President Trump is adamant. “The men and women who serve our nation in combat deserve a plan for victory,” he proclaimed in Monday night’s big speech. “They deserve the tools they need, and the trust they have earned, to fight and to win.”

The president hammered home the point, again and again:

Our troops will fight to win. We will fight to win. From now on, victory will have a clear definition: attacking our enemies, obliterating ISIS, crushing al-Qaeda, preventing the Taliban from taking over Afghanistan, and stopping mass terror attacks against America before they emerge.

Stirring stuff. Or at least it would have been if Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had not, less than 24 hours later, undercut his boss’s bold message. Victory? There is no battlefield victory to be had in Afghanistan, Tillerson maintained at Foggy Bottom. Instead, the modest goal is to convince the Taliban that, while “we might not win,” they won’t win either.

Eh . . . not so stirring.

By the time the secretary was done tinkering with the president’s “plan for victory,” one couldn’t be sure if the Taliban was an enemy, a terrorist organization, or a “peace partner.” Indeed, not content to leave pathetic enough alone, Tillerson contemplated “political legitimacy” for the mullahs, proclaiming that the Trump administration “stand[s] ready to support peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban without precondition.” You read that right: without precondition — not even the condition that they abandon their alliance with al-Qaeda (you know, the reason we went to Afghanistan in the first place). As the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes observed, this is “the same kind of diplomatic tail-chasing that was a priority of the Obama administration’s failed approach.”

The band’s got new players. The pitch is a bit higher. But the song remains the same.

Ultimately, Tillerson elaborated, “it is going to be up to the Afghan government and the representatives of the Taliban to work through a reconciliation process.” Sound familiar? Yeah . . . just like Obama’s secretary of state, John Kerry, during an April 2016 trip to Kabul, expressing “support for the government of Afghanistan’s efforts to end the conflict in Afghanistan through a peace and reconciliation process with the Taliban.”

The Taliban has now been recognized by the Obama and Trump administrations as the solution to the Afghanistan problem. That is, Trump has adopted The Way of the Swamp: Any problem that won’t go away eventually becomes “the solution.” The strategy — and who says hope isn’t a strategy? — is that the mullahs will finally come to their senses, end their remorseless jihad, and join the ineffective regime we have struggled to prop up for over a decade.

In his televised address on the future of American operations in Afghanistan, President Donald Trump took a sharp turn from his predecessors.

I share [the American people’s] frustration over a foreign policy that has spent too much time, energy, money, and most importantly lives, trying to rebuild countries in our own image, instead of pursuing our security interests above all other considerations.
Ultimately, it is up to the people of Afghanistan to take ownership of their future, to govern their society, and to achieve an everlasting peace. We are a partner and a friend, but we will not dictate to the Afghan people how to live, or how to govern their own complex society. We are not nation-building again. We are killing terrorists.
We will no longer use American military might to construct democracies in faraway lands, or try to rebuild other countries in our own image. Those days are now over. Instead, we will work with allies and partners to protect our shared interests. We are not asking others to change their way of life, but to pursue common goals that allow our children to live better and safer lives. This principled realism will guide our decisions moving forward

Think “Egypt” in place of “Afghanistan” in each phrase and then ask how the administration decided to cut nearly cut nearly $100 million dollars in U.S. military and economic aid to Egypt and withhold another $200 million in military financing over human rights concerns and a change in law governing civic organizations and NGOs.

Is Egypt a paragon of the American definition of human rights? No. Is Egypt an American-style democracy? No. Is Egypt a bulwark against both ISIS and Iranian-supported radicalism in the Middle East? Yes, it is. Is Egypt’s President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi “protect(ing) our shared interests” and “pursu(ing) common goals” with the United States? Damned right he is.

Egypt and Israel have partnered to control the tidal wave of Iranian-sponsored and ISIS-related people and weapons moving across Sinai and Egypt and into Libya, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. (Note that all of these are less than stable and lie just south of NATO.) Egypt sells natural gas to Jordan, which is facing its own security threats. Egypt moved with Saudi Arabia to highlight the problem Qatar’s support for Iran, as well as the Muslim Brotherhood and Sunni jihadist groups, has caused in the region — and for Egypt itself. And, most recently, Egypt — with the concurrence of Russia — has begun diplomacy in areas of Syria to shore up local ceasefires and, by the way and by design, to discomfit Iran.

Nothing should suit the United States more than to find Egypt working to ensure that Iran does not have a permanent hold on Syria.

While Russia is seeking an exit from Syria that preserves its naval and air bases in the country, Iran’s long-term objective in Syria is to be there. And in Lebanon. And in Iraq. The three countries constitute an overland avenue for Iran to the Mediterranean Sea and a lid over American allies Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Israel. Then consider Iranian expansion in the areas south, east, and west of those countries — in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea with a base in Yemen — potentially able to close the Bab el Mandeb Straits, cutting off Israel and Jordan’s only outlet to the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean. Egypt, on the northwest side of the Red Sea, can also be stymied by Iranian aggression there, particularly since Sudan and Eritrea, south of Egypt, are corrupt, unstable, and susceptible to smuggling.

The trouble with the new (or, rather, not-so-new) Trump Administration war plan for Afghanistan is that it’s a loser. Sure, the president gets high marks for finally talking about “victory” in Afghanistan—after 17 years of seemingly endless warfare, it’s nice to hear the word mentioned. Yet, for all of the talk of victory, the president offered nothing new, at least strategically, that would achieve that goal.https://amgreatness.com/2017/08/24/blank-check-afghanistan/

Angelo Codevilla has also argued that we got nothing new from Trump on Afghanistan. At a tactical level, the president made much sense: we would no longer have the onerous rules of engagement that have prevented our gallant troops from fully bringing the hurt to our enemies. Battlefield commanders, not politicians in Washington, would have near-complete autonomy over the day-to-day course of the war. This is a refreshing change from the previous administration, which squandered Americans’ time, money, and lives in Afghanistan fighting simply to hold on, rather than win or withdraw. The restraining tactics of the Obama years were perfectly suited to a strategy of stalemate.

But do improved and sensible tactics automatically suggest a more sensible strategy? What is our strategy?

The best President Trump gave us was that “conditions on the ground,” rather than arbitrary time tables, would dictate the course of the war. Although sound policy, that remains a tactical rather than strategic consideration. And, really, this rhetoric sounds eerily reminiscent of George W. Bush and his “low energy” brother, Jeb!

To be clear, I am not an outright opponent of the plan, but I am a skeptic. For instance, supporters of the president’s plan argue that this rehash of the old plan is exactly what the president promised during the campaign. “Right now,” F. H. Buckley argues, “the principal breeding ground of Islamic jihadism is Afghanistan, not Syria, and Trump correctly concluded that the very best way to prevent another 9/11 is to continue the fight in that country. It’s just what he promised on the campaign trail.”

Respectfully, no, it is not.

First, people like myself supported what was once referred to as the “Counterterrorism-Plus” strategy advanced by that broken clock and former Vice President Joe Biden. This plan called for focusing on the counterterrorism, rather than on the counterinsurgency aspects of the war. Right now, President Trump’s plan sounds dreadfully similar to our current counterinsurgency effort—sending more forces (around 4,000 troops) to win the fickle hearts and minds of the Afghan people, thereby denying insurgents, such as the Taliban or al-Qaeda, recruits. This plan has never worked in Afghanistan. So, whether it’s 4,000 or 40,000 more troops, it’s still a bad plan. Some hearts can’t be won.

In Tuesday’s speech, President Trump denounced the flow of U.S. money to Pakistan while that nation harbors terrorists. South Asian Islamism is an enormous problem, and yet a great deal of the discussion in America surrounding Islamism focuses on the Egyptian-founded Muslim Brotherhood. But the Muslim Brotherhood is far from the only Islamist network in the United States; it is simply the best known. Other Islamist movements also benefit from government ignorance about the diversity of Islam and Islamism across the globe. The South Asian Islamist movement Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), for instance, has received millions from the U.S. taxpayer for its powerful network of charities and welfare services, which are designed to obtain external funding as well as legitimize JI as a representative voice of Muslims, in both America and South Asia.

Although JI has its own ideologues, literature, and infrastructure, it is often described as the South Asian “cousin” of the Muslim Brotherhood. Qazi Ahmad Hussain, head of JI in Pakistan, has declared: “We consider ourselves as an integral part of the Brotherhood and the Islamic movement in Egypt. . . . Our nation is one.” JI’s history is bloody. During the 1971 Liberation War in Bangladesh, JI fighters helped Pakistani forces massacre hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis seeking independence from Pakistan. Several JI leaders guilty of these war crimes fled to the West, where they helped establish JI organizations that operated as community leadership groups. Two western JI leaders have since been sentenced to death in absentia for these killings by a UN-backed war-crimes tribunal.

One of those convicted, Ashrafuzzaman Khan, served as a leading official of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), a prominent American Muslim organization. Twice a year, ICNA jointly hosts a conference with the Muslim American Society (MAS), a leading Muslim Brotherhood institution. Unsurprisingly, these conferences are filled with extremist preachers. Ahmed Taha, an ICNA-MAS official who organized their conference in December, has republished posts on social media stating: “O Muslim, O servant of God. There is a Jew behind me, come kill him.”

Despite its long history of extremism, in 2016 ICNA received $1.3 million of taxpayers’ money as part of a grant awarded by the Department of Homeland Security.

ICNA is not the only JI organization in America. Nor is it the only JI group to have received taxpayer funds. Behind ICNA and other front groups around the world, JI operates an enormous network of registered charities and community organizations. One of the most prominent is the Rural Education and Development (READ) Foundation.

Strategy is neither more nor less than a map for getting from here to there—a reasonable plan for using what you have to accomplish what you want. President Trump’s August 21 speech, touted as “a new strategy” for U.S. involvement in Afghanistan is not a strategy, because it did not even try to show that what it proposes—in fact it proposed nothing concrete—should be expected to achieve anything at all.

The president made zero attempt to connect ends and means. Nor was anything new about his proposal, other than the application of new adjectives to what the U.S. government has been doing in Afghanistan and elsewhere for two generations. The one new element, announcing that henceforth the United States would take India’s side in its multifaceted, existential quarrel with Pakistan, is pregnant with far more trouble than today’s U.S. foreign policy establishment is capable of imagining.

The speech’s substance was Trump’s surrender of his—and of the 2016 electorate’s—point of view on foreign affairs. Trump said that, having been schooled by the foreign policy establishment’s expertise, he now concludes that he and those who voted for him had been wrong. U.S troops would stay in Afghanistan. More would go. But now they would “fight to win.” Win what? How? No attempt to answer. Just empty, swaggering words. They wouldn’t “nation build” but establish the security environment in which the government could do that. These are the very words used to describe the U.S. “strategy” in the Vietnam War, and in the Iraq. It is also what Americans have been saying since they set up Afghanistan’s government in 2002.

Unlike Obama in Iraq, and unlike what Trump had promised the voters, he pledged to stay in Afghanistan practically forever. But he threatened the Afghan government with leaving unless it played its part. Bush had done the same in Iraq. In the end, it was the Iraqi government that had asked the Americans to leave.

So, just what can we expect the “Trump Strategy” to do, for how long, and with what results? Because our establishment does not know how to do anything other than what it has been doing, more of the same is the best that any reasonable person, of any political persuasion may expect.

The U.S. formula is inflexible: set up a centralized government comprising as much of the political opposition as possible, and “secure” the country on its behalf by promoting “social programs.” The government’s opponents are America’s enemies.

This formula is especially surreal in Afghanistan. The Taliban are ethnic Pashtun, tied politically as well as ethnically to Pakistan. Their dalliance with Afghan Arabs such as Osama bin Laden ended when Pakistan’s president, General Pervez Musharraf, pulled the string on them in 2001, and the United States helped the Northern Alliance of Tajiks and Uzbeks to defeat them. But then we set up a centralized government that was mostly Pashtun but excluded the remnant Taliban, while disarming the Tajiks and Uzbeks. This application of the standard U.S formula started a civil war among the Pashtun, with the other groups trying to take care of themselves as best they could by providing mercenaries to either side, but certainly not helping the Americans. Add to this the massive corruption engendered by billions of U.S. dollars, and we get a political disaster for America.