RUTHFULLY YOURS

Charles Lipson is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where he is founding director of PIPES, the Program on International Politics, Economics, and Security.

The United States has fundamentally changed its strategy toward North Korea and its growing nuclear threat. Why? Why switch to a policy that carries such profound risks?

The short answer is that the Trump administration fears that waiting is even riskier. Previous administrations have tried to wait, relying on mid-sized deals sweetened with small bribes. Those won’t work anymore. They probably never did since the Kim family regime always cheated. Now, the Trump administration has made a basic reassessment. Their calculation: Time is on North Korea’s side, not ours. Temporizing only magnifies the dangers.

That is why the Korean Crisis has reemerged. In the short-term, the Trump administration decided to force the issue. In the long-term, it was North Korea’s steady progress on nuclear weapons and long-range missiles that brought it on.

A New Administration, a New Policy

The new policy was announced on March 17, when Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said simply, “Let me be very clear, the policy of strategic patience has ended…All options are on the table.” Blunt and clear. The Trump administration would not continue the policies that had failed Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama and would, within a few years, bring the United States’ biggest cities within reach of North Korean nuclear missiles.

This week, Vice President Pence reiterated the new policy during his visit to South Korea: “If China is unable to deal with North Korea, the United States and our allies will.” He looked as somber and resolute as his statement. President Trump has made similar comments and made them repeatedly. This is policy, not personal whim.

Equally important, President Trump has started to restore America’s reputation for resolve, backed by credible military threats. This reputation was in tatters after eight years of President Obama’s hesitation, hollow threats and military decay.

With U.S. missiles flying in Syria, the “mother of all bombs” exploding in Afghanistan, and an aircraft-carrier strike group heading toward North Korea, has there been a revolution in President Trump’s foreign policy?

His most fervent supporters shouldn’t get overly exercised and his interventionist critics shouldn’t get too excited. What has been on offer so far is broadly consistent with the Jacksonian worldview that is the core of Trump’s posture toward the world.

Trump’s views are obviously inchoate. He has an attitude rather than a doctrine, and upon leaving office, he surely won’t, like Richard Nixon, write a series of books on international affairs.

What we have learned since he took office is that Trump is not an isolationist. At times, he’s sounded like one. His America First slogan (inadvertently) harkened back to the movement to keep us out of World War II. His outlandish questioning of the NATO alliance, an anchor of the West, created the sense that he might be willing to overturn the foundations of the post–World War II order.

This hasn’t come to pass. It’s not possible to be a truly isolationist president of the United States in the 21st century unless you want to spend all your time unspooling U.S. commitments and managing the resulting disruption and crises. And such an approach would undercut the most consistent element of Trump’s approach — namely strength.

His set-piece foreign-policy speeches during the campaign were clear on this. “The world is most peaceful and most prosperous when America is strongest,” he said last April at the Center for the National Interest. “America will continue and continue forever to play the role of peacemaker. We will always help save lives and indeed humanity itself, but to play the role, we must make America strong again.”

In direct contradiction to isolationism, he said repeatedly on the campaign trail that he would take the war to ISIS and build up our defenses. He even called himself — in a malapropism — “the most militaristic person you will ever meet.”

Now, there is no doubt that the Syrian strike is a notable departure for Trump, and he defended it in unapologetically humanitarian terms. But it’s entirely possible that the strike will only have the narrow purpose of reestablishing a red line against the use of chemical weapons in Syria and reasserting American credibility.

That is particularly important in the context of the brewing showdown with North Korea, which he roughly forecast in his speech last April. “President Obama watches helplessly as North Korea increases its aggression and expands further and further with its nuclear reach,” Trump said, advocating using economic pressure on China to “get them to do what they have to do with North Korea, which is totally out of control.”

The Tomahawks in Syria and saber-rattling at North Korea have Trump’s critics on the right and left claiming he’s becoming a neoconservative — a term of abuse that is most poorly understood by the people most inclined to use it. All neocons may be hawks, but not all hawks are neocons, who are distinctive in their idealism and robust interventionism.

We haven’t heard paeans to democracy from Trump, or clarion calls for human rights. He hasn’t seriously embraced regime change anywhere (even if his foreign-policy officials say Assad has to go). He shows no sign of a willingness to make a major commitment of U.S. ground troops abroad.

The Tomahawk volley attack, for all its ostentatious symbolism, served larger strategic purposes. It reminded a world without morality that there is still a shred of a rule or two: Do not use nerve gas on the battlefield or against civilians. The past faux redline from Obama, the systematic use of chlorine gas by Syria, and its contextualization by the Obama administration had insidiously eroded that old battlefield prohibition. Trump was right to seek to revive it.

The subsequent MOAB bomb strike in Afghanistan is useful against ISIS’s subterranean nests, and in signaling the Taliban and ISIS that the U.S. too can be unpredictable and has not quite written off its 16-year commitment. But as in the case of the Tomahawk strikes against Syria, it also fulfilled the larger purpose of reminding enemies, such as Islamic terrorists, North Korea, and Iran (which all stash weapons of destruction in caves and the like) that the U.S. is capable of anything.

In other words, apparently anywhere Trump thinks that he can make a point about deterrence, with good odds of not getting Americans killed or starting a war (he used Tomahawks not pilots where Russian planes were in the vicinity), he will probably drop a bomb or shoot off a missile or send in an iconic carrier fleet.

The message reminds the world that the Obama administration’s “lead from behind,” “don’t do stupid sh**,” plastic red-button reset, Cairo Speech foreign policy followed no historical arc that bent anywhere. And the U.S. was previously on the wrong, not the right, side of both history and the traditions of U.S. bipartisan foreign policy — an aberration from the past, not a blueprint of the future.

Like Ronald Reagan, who, after Jimmy Carter’s managed declinism, shelled Lebanon, bombed Gaddafi, and invaded Grenada, Trump is trying to thread the needle between becoming bogged down somewhere and doing nothing.

No president in recent memory also has outsourced such responsibility to his military advisers, whom Trump refers to as “our” or “my” “generals.” He can afford to for now, because he has made excellent appointments at Defense, State, National Security, and Homeland Security. These are men who justifiably have won broad bipartisan support and who believe in the ancient ways of military and spiritual deterrence, balance of power, and alliances rather than the U.N., presidential sonorousness, or soft power to keep the peace.

These opportunistic deterrent expressions are likewise intended to remind several parties in particular that the Obama hiatus is over.

Apparently, Trump will not necessarily reset the Obama reset of the Bush reset with Russia. Instead, he probably believes that Putin will soon agree that the 2009–16 era was an abnormal condition in which a far weaker Russia bullied friends and connived against almost everything the U.S. was for. And such asymmetry could not be expected to go on. A return to normal relations is not brinkmanship; it should settle down to tense competition, some cooperation, and grudging respect among two powerful rivals. Who knows, Putin may come to respect (and even prefer) an American leader who is unpredictable and unapologetically tough without being sanctimonious, sermonizing — and weak.

President Trump is reversing some of his foreign-policy positions, but this should be no great surprise and so far the changes are mainly for the better. Mr. Trump is never going to pursue a consistent geopolitical strategy because he doesn’t think that way. As President he is approaching the world as he does everything else—as a transactional deal maker who wants agreements that he can sell as a security or economic success. Exhibit A is his recent engagement with China over North Korea’s nuclear missile program.

Mr. Trump campaigned last year as the President who would challenge China’s trade practices, naming Beijing a currency manipulator “on day one.” But after the election President Obama advised him to make North Korea’s nuclear advances a priority. Mr. Trump had no problem shifting quickly from threatening China on trade to using trade as a lever to get China to help the U.S. restrain or end North Korea’s nuclear threat.

“Why would I call China a currency manipulator when they are working with us on the North Korean problem? We will see what happens!” Mr. Trump tweeted on Easter Sunday, explaining why his Treasury Department chose not to slap the manipulator label on China. This policy shift has the added benefit of recognizing that China has been trying for months to prop up its currency, not devalue it for trade advantages.

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration has made a theme of ramping up political pressure on North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. The Pentagon sent a carrier group to the East China Sea for maneuvers with the Japanese navy. Mr. Trump tweeted after his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping this month that “I have great confidence that China will properly deal with North Korea. If they are unable to do so, the U.S., with its allies, will!”

H.R. McMaster, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, warned North Korea on Sunday that its “destabilizing” behavior “can’t continue” after the North launched another missile Saturday, albeit a failure that exploded soon after launch. There’s been much media speculation that a U.S. cyber attack helped to scuttle the missile launch. We’d like to think so, though no one in government has confirmed it.

The problem is that so far there’s little evidence that China is changing its policy toward Pyongyang. The case for optimism includes some editorials in Chinese state media criticizing the Kim regime, as well as reports that China has turned back North Korean ships carrying coal exports. The White House also points to China’s decision last week to abstain at the U.N. and not join Russia in vetoing a resolution condemning Syria’s chemical attack.CONTINUE AT SITE

The Trump administration is taking heat for striking a Syrian air base with Tomahawk missiles and hitting ISIS terrorists in Afghanistan with a MOAB, a conventional bomb so big that it has been dubbed the “Mother of All Bombs.” No doubt there are useful debates to be had about the pros and cons, both tactical and juridical. But one sure upside of these strikes is that they are a step toward restoring abroad the credibility of America as a power to be reckoned with.

That’s big, in ways that go way beyond the immediate battlefields. In a world grown dramatically more dangerous during President Obama’s eight years of appeasement and retreat, America badly and urgently needs to restore its lost credibility.
It would be great if diplomats could protect America, its allies and its interests with words alone. But in matters involving aggressive tyrannies, words don’t mean much unless they are backed up by military muscle and the credible willingness to use force. When that threat goes missing, predators take notice.

It’s also clear that when America backs down, the threats tend to compound. Predatory regimes tend to do business together, observe each other and learn from each other. When Russia snatches turf from a neighbor and gets away with it, that sends a message to China.

Beijing, with its interest in building artificial islands topped with military bases in the South China Sea, can see that it’s open season in Asia for accelerating such territorial grabs. When North Korea conducts an illicit nuclear test and gets away with it, we can reasonably assume that Iran takes note.

For the world’s most dangerously ambitious and threatening tyrannies — from Russia to China, from North Korea to Iran — Obama’s neutering of American power over the past eight years created a host of opportunities that they eagerly seized. The sorry truth, given the character of these regimes, is that they would have been fools not to.

By the time Obama left office this January, America’s official words meant almost nothing. Take, for instance, Obama’s declaration in 2013 of a “red line” over the use of chemical weapons in Syria. That gave way to former Secretary of State John Kerry’s Lilliputian assurance that an American strike on Syria’s chemical weapons facilities would be “unbelievably small.” That turned into no strike at all, as Obama entrusted Russia with the supervision of its client despot in Damascus, President Bashar Assad — whose resignation Obama had called for, to no effect, two years earlier.

Donald Trump has delivered bombs to the West enemies. Obama shipped pallets of cold, hard cash to Iran in a ransom deal that will do nothing to crimp the mullahs’ mischief while further heightening Israel’s jeopardy. Guess which president the media paints as the wise and heroic leader?
So President Trump bombed Syria’s Shayrat air force base on April 7 with 59 cruise missiles. Compare and contrast with President Obama’s “bombing”[1] of Tehran in January, 2016, with pallet-loads of European banknotes totalling $US1.7b. There was $400 million in Swiss franc notes and $1.3b in Euro notes.

Obama had organized the swap of US government dollars for the banknotes. He had a technical difficulty with the $1.3 billion because a long-standing US government rule limited payout to $1 billion. So he used his initiative and split his $1.3b request into 13 separate requests of $99,999,999.99 and a top-up of $10,390,236.28.[2]

The pallets of banknotes materialized at Geneva airport on January 3 ($400 million in francs), and January 22 and February 5 ($1.3b in Euros – some accounts say that other hard-currency notes were included). Each time, the treasure was ushered into a waiting, unmarked Iranian cargo plane. The plane took the money to Tehran and only the Iranians know where it went thereafter. Let us hope not on weapons and salaries for terrorists.

It’s a racy story but what’s it all about? It’s about a weekend’s work by Obama on January 16-17, 2016, where he consummated the anti-nuclear pact with Iran, did a prisoner swap of four Americans in Iran for seven Iranian-American sanctions-violators in the US, and settled a debt to Iran dating back to 1979 when the populace overthrew Shah Pahlavi. All three aspects involve murky stuff which has gradually trickled into the public domain, and which I’ll try to explain.

Obama’s main goal (jointly with five other world powers) was to thwart Iran’s rapid progress to the nuclear-bomb club.

In brief, Iran signed up that weekend to switching its deeply-buried Fordo nuclear plant to “a centre for science research”; to making its Arak plutonium-capable plant inoperable; and to halving its U235 bomb-capable uranium centrifuges at Natanz from 10,000 to 5,000. Enrichment is to stop at 3.7%, compared with the current 20% (bomb-capable is 90%). It has also promised to cap its stockpile of low-enriched uranium to 300kg (insufficient for an A-bomb upgrade) for 15 years.

Great stuff, but even the Obama-loving New York Times expressed concern that Iran would make monkeys out of the International Atomic Energy Agency scrutineers, given “Iran’s history of evasions, stonewalling and illicit procurements.” But assuming Iran behaves itself, the US will lift sanctions against arms sales in five years, and sales of ballistic missiles in eight years.

The Iran legislators and their street mobs have responded to the nuclear deal by retaining their No 1 slogan of “Death to America!” and re-iterating their ambition to nuke Israel as soon as feasible.

The Israeli government rated the Iran deal as a repeat of Munich in 1938, a licence for a second Holocaust, and a sop to a global terrorism. It repeated these views last August, when Obama claimed, improbably,

“Israeli military and security community acknowledges this [deal] has been a game changer…The country that was most opposed to the deal. By all accounts, it has worked exactly the way we said it was going to work.”

In reality, Iran the previous year had violated a 2010 Security Council resolution banning it from nuclear-capable missile tests. It did a further missile test in January, 2017, which exploited a loophole in a successor Security Council resolution.[3] The update inexplicably changed the wording from “shall not” test nuclear-capable missiles (emphatic) to Iran being “called upon” not to test such missiles (translation: utter, non-binding waffle).

Where is the Republican-controlled Congress on Syria? By all accounts, it is busy cheerleading the president’s firing of 59 Tomahawk missiles at a foreign sovereign — an offensive attack that was unprovoked and unauthorized by Congress, rendering it unconstitutional. With a Republican in the White House, though, Republicans on Capitol Hill are all for executive overreach, despite having spent the last eight years chiding a Democratic president’s excesses and Middle Eastern misadventures.

Of course, the bottom line is the same: Congress does nothing. But at least during the Obama years, legislative spinelessness was swaddled in righteous constitutional rhetoric. Now, lawmakers outright encourage presidential imperiousness and their own consequent irrelevance.

The Constitution vests in Congress the power to declare war — meaning the power to authorize military operations. The president may order the use of force unilaterally only when the United States is under attack, or at least the threat of attack. There was no such threat from the Syrian regime.

That makes Trump’s aggression unprovoked. Yet, Trump apologists claim that the use of chemical weapons by the despicable Assad — perhaps in collusion with his despicable Russian and Iranian enablers — is provocation enough. It is not. To be a provocation warranting unauthorized forcible retaliation, an attack must target the United States. Or, as someone once said: America First!

The Syrian atrocity — or should we say, the latest Syrian atrocity — had nothing to do with America. It was more internecine Islamic savagery. It was a case of a ruthless dictator in a barbaric civil war conducting yet another attack on his opposition, including the non-combatant civilians among whom that opposition hides. And as the Long War Journal’s Thomas Joscelyn reminds us in an essential report published by the Weekly Standard, Assad’s opposition includes al-Qaeda cells, Islamic State elements, and assorted Islamist militants. These factions are notorious for their own atrocities and desire to cleanse Syria of its Christian and other non-Islamic populations.

American troops are on the ground in Syria, coordinating coalition attacks on the anti-Assad jihadists. Assad, Russia, and their equally loathsome Iranian/Hezbollah allies are not targeting those Americans in Syria. Why would they?

While Assad & Co. avoid confrontation with American forces, Trump’s attack on Assad buoys the jihadists. It gives them hope that if they can hang in long enough, stave off the reluctant American intervention long enough, the new administration will engineer Assad’s removal from power — an intention Trump’s State Department is now signaling. That would pave the way for the jihadists to turn most of Syria into another of the Sunni sharia-supremacist basket-cases we’ve come to know so well — like Egypt while under Muslim Brotherhood-control, Afghanistan under Taliban domination, post-Qaddafi Libya, and other failed states whose ungovernable frontiers become safe havens for anti-American terrorism.

No one expects the Trump administration to reverse the disastrous effects of the Obama supported Muslim Brotherhood’s highjacking of the “Arab-Spring” in the Middle East that increased the regional contest for supremacy in the Islamic world. The rivalry has intensified between the Sunni camp led by Saudi Arabia and the Shiite camp led by Iran – each with their pet terrorist organizations.

It’s hard to overstate how much damage was done by the Obama Administration’s misjudgment that Sunni jihadists and Shia Iran were somehow friendly to us and could be useful tools of American policy. But using jihadi groups claiming to be less violent than al-Qaida and ISIS resulted in the Benghazi massacre of four Americans including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, the destabilization of Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria, and elsewhere.

The “Stop Arming Terrorists Act” (SATA) (HR 608), which was sponsored Representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) would help curtail U.S. assistance to Sunni and Shia jihadists, who would gladly use it against Americans, not not only against each other.

Rep. Gabbard points out in her introductory statement for the bill,

“Under U.S. law it is illegal for any American to provide money or assistance to al-Qaida, ISIS or other terrorist groups. If you or I gave money, weapons or support to al-Qaida or ISIS, we would be thrown in jail. Yet the U.S. government has been violating this law for years, quietly supporting allies and partners of al-Qaida, ISIL, Jabhat Fateh al Sham, and other terrorist groups with money, weapons, and intelligence support, in their fight to overthrow the Syrian government.”

America’s surgical strike on Syrian regime targets last Thursday night — and this Thursday’s “mother of all non-nuclear bomb” attack on Sunni terrorist infrastructure in Afghanistan — garnered surprisingly widespread bipartisan support, but put some of U.S. President Donald Trump’s critics in a bit of a rhetorical quandary. How could they word their defense of Trump’s bold yet not extreme warning shots without putting a dent in their distrust of the new occupant of the Oval Office?

Coming up with a solution to this problem turned out not to be so difficult for those pundits and politicians who have been paying close attention both to Syrian President Bashar Assad’s slaughter of his own people — most recently with chemical weapons — and to every syllable of Trump’s Twitter feed.

Their argument now goes that Trump’s latest military moves — and shift in attitude toward NATO — are examples of policy “flip-flopping” from the “isolationism” expressed in his inaugural address to a newfound global interventionism. They contend that a president who so drastically and swiftly shifts gears is perfectly capable of performing yet another about-face when the mood arises.

The trouble is that this assertion is both overly simplistic and inaccurate.

In the first place, Trump himself openly acknowledged that though he had said he was not going to intervene in Syria, he “changed his mind” when it was established that Assad was killing babies with sarin gas — after lying about having rid his country of chemical weapons. He has also openly declared war on the Islamic State group. This hardly constitutes a flip-flop. Instead, it indicates flexibility of thought and action on the part of a leader faced with a set of circumstances that warrants both.

The same goes for his statements on NATO, which he originally called “obsolete” and has since deemed necessary. His initial attack on the organization was that its members were not pulling their weight. This spurred them to make at least symbolic gestures, such as slightly increasing their budgets, to persuade him to reconsider. This is no small thing.