RUTHFULLY YOURS

Reprinted from Hoover.org.

Before his confirmation as the sixty-ninth U.S. Secretary of State, former Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson was questioned by Senators from both parties about his qualifications for the nation’s highest diplomatic post. Like Trump, Tillerson has no experience in public service, unusual for both a President and a Secretary of State in modern times. Such reservations raise the issue of what types of experience and knowledge are necessary for conducting foreign policy.

In the modern technocratic state, many believe that creating policy is a professional activity requiring skills and knowledge developed in institutions of higher learning and think tanks. Both Tillerson’s critics and defenders held that assumption during his confirmation hearings. His critics claimed he lacked those requisite skills, while his defenders argued that he acquired them as CEO of Exxon doing international business with numerous countries and government officials. The reason those skills are necessary, both sides believe, is because they’ll help the Secretary of State anticipate developments abroad and respond appropriately.

But the history of U.S. foreign policy since World War II is replete with failures to correctly understand the international landscape, suggesting that technical skills and knowledge may not be enough for managing foreign affairs. In 1956 Dwight Eisenhower and his advisors misinterpreted Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal as an act of anticolonial nationalist self-assertion rather than a bid for regional primacy. Nor did they foresee its malign consequences, such as greater Soviet influence in the region at the expense of the United States and Israel. Even more telling, a whole academic discipline, Sovietology, along with the State Department failed to anticipate the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, or to imagine that a foreign policy “amateur” like Ronald Reagan could craft a policy––“we win, they lose” –– that hastened its destruction.

Just as consequential for today is the misunderstanding of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which emboldened a new aggressive phase of Islamic terrorism still roiling the world nearly forty years later. Likewise, the Arab-Israel conflict has been misinterpreted by scholars of international relations, many of whom, despite all evidence to the contrary, continue to believe that Palestinian “national aspirations” and Israeli “settlements,” rather than Islamist doctrines, are the prime driver of not just that conflict, but the rise of jihadist violence elsewhere. Finally, in the last eight years, we have witnessed foreign policy decisions based on faulty or politicized analyses and unexamined assumptions, resulting in the eclipse of our prestige and effectiveness by rivals like Russia and Iran.

These failures reflect the problem of large institutions like government agencies and university disciplines––what the French social critic Alexis Carrel called “professional deformation.” Assured of steady funding and hence unaccountable to the market and, apart from political appointees, to the voters when they fail, such institutions can repeat received wisdom year after year while ignoring contrary evidence or alternative arguments that challenge the institutional paradigm.

The Iranian Revolution is a case in point. The agitation against the Shah was interpreted through the postwar narrative of anticolonial resistance to a corrupt tyrant in the name of national self-determination and independence. In fact, it was a long-brewing religious revolution against a secularizing and modernizing regime that the Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of the revolution, said was “fundamentally opposed to Islam itself and the existence of a religious class.” Forty years later, under administrations from both parties, this misunderstanding has continued to shape America’s Middle East foreign policy.

WRONG! AMERICA SHOULD NOT ACCEPT THE IMPERIALIST CHINESE CLAIM OF “ONE CHINA”.RSK
President Trump’s affirmation of America’s “One China” policy last week avoids one U.S.-China pitfall, but that still leaves the issue of how to build on his landmark December phone call with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen. He has several tools to boost ties with Taiwan as a democratic and strategic partner.

The 1979 Taiwan Relations Act commits the U.S. to helping Taiwan defend itself, including the sale of defensive weapons. We hear the Trump team has inherited a roughly $1 billion arms package prepared by the Obama Administration, but it consists mainly of munitions, not new systems such as upgraded fighter jets or unmanned vehicles. This reflects the modest pattern of recent years. From 2011 to 2015 the U.S. even blocked Taiwan from submitting letters of request for weapons.

The new Administration could set arms sales on a more stable course by reinstating annual meetings to discuss the island’s needs. For example, Taipei wants U.S. technology to build submarines, a request U.S. planners will have to weigh against the virtue of offering cheaper weapons that can be fielded more quickly and are less vulnerable to Chinese attack, such as mines and missile systems.
Last year’s Pentagon budget called for flag-grade U.S. officers to begin visiting Taiwan for the first time in decades, an ideal mission for U.S. Pacific Commander Admiral Harry Harris. The law also called for more cooperation in threat analysis, force planning, intelligence and joint training. In 2012 the U.S. considered inviting Taiwan to the multinational Red Flag air combat exercise in Nevada but decided against it for fear of angering Beijing.

Diplomatic exchanges have practical and symbolic value. U.S. Cabinet officials could visit Taiwan, and their Taiwanese counterparts should have dignified and reliable access to officials in Washington. U.S. diplomats could also give Taiwan more help at forums such as the World Health Organization and the International Civil Aviation Organization, where China wants to freeze out Taiwanese representatives.

Trade is crucial. Taiwan’s dependence on exports to China threatens its economic and political autonomy, so Taipei should conclude a bilateral deal with the U.S. after a decade of delay. The U.S. can encourage other friendly countries to pursue deals, too, especially Japan and Australia. Japan, like the U.S., faces Taiwanese restrictions on its food exports, and Australia will hesitate to upset Beijing, but the deals would be major advances for democratic cooperation in the Pacific.

The U.S. can also help Taiwan with its shaky energy supply. Taipei is making the mistake of closing its nuclear power plants by 2025 and trying to replace that 18% share of energy production with renewables. It makes more sense to import cheaper and abundant U.S. natural gas, reducing the danger if China ever halts cross-Strait exports of coal.

These initiatives are all consistent with the “One China” policy, though that wouldn’t stop Beijing from protesting. Many inside and outside of China spun Mr. Trump’s policy statement last week as a sign he blinked to get a phone call from Chinese President Xi Jinping. The way to prove that’s not true is to deepen ties systematically, even if quietly, with America’s longtime friends in Taiwan.

The abrupt Obama administration pre-election pullout from Iraq in 2011, along with the administration’s failed reset with Russia and the Iran deal, created a three-headed hydra in the Middle East.

What makes the Middle East monster deadly is the interplay between the Iranian terrorist regime and its surrogates Hezbollah and the Assad regime; Russian president Vladimir Putin’s deployment of bombers into Syria and Iraq after a 40-year Russian hiatus in the region; and the medieval beheaders of the Islamic State.

Add into the brew anti-Americanism, genocide, millions of refugees, global terrorism, and nuclear weapons.

ISIS is simultaneously at war against the Assad regime, Iran and Iranian surrogates such Hezbollah, and Russian expeditionary forces. ISIS also seeks to energize terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe.

Stranger still, ISIS almost surely is receiving stealth support from Sunni nations in the Middle East, some of them ostensibly American allies.

This matrix gets even crazier.

The authors of reset policy during the Obama administration are now furious at President Trump for even talking about what they tried for years: reaching out to Putin. Yet in the Middle East, Russia is doing us a favor by attacking ISIS, even as it does no favors in saving the genocidal Assad regime that has murdered tens of thousands of innocents — along with lots of ISIS terrorists as well.

Iran is the sworn enemy of the United States, yet its foreign proxies attack our shared enemy, ISIS. The very troops who once blew up Americans in Iraq with shaped charges are for now de facto allies on the Syrian and Iraqi battlefields.

Given that there is now no political support for surging thousands more U.S. troops into Iraq to reverse the disastrous Obama-administration pullout, there are three strategic choices in dealing with the Middle East hydra, all of them bad:

One, hold our nose, and for now ally with Russia and Iran to destroy ISIS first. Then deal with the other rivalries later on. (The model is the American-Soviet alliance against Hitler that quickly morphed after 1945 into the Cold War.)

Two, work with the least awful of the three, which is probably Russia. (The model might be Henry Kissinger’s outreach to Mao’s China that left Moscow and Beijing at odds and confused over the role of the United States.)

The Trump White House continues to receive advice – solicited and unsolicited, in letters to the editor, op-eds, essays, and policy papers – as to what its foreign policy priorities should be. It is tempting to presume that problems called “priorities” can be resolved with just a little more savvy or a little more will. But if they could have been, they would have been. Instead, the administration might consider priorities for American behavior – political, economic, and military.

First, there are three questions to be asked:

What should the United States do to ensure that allies feel secure and adversaries don’t?
How can America encourage countries that are neither allies nor adversaries to cooperate on issues of importance?
How can Washington encourage countries to want to be “more like us” (politically and economically free with more transparent government) and “less like them” (totalitarian, communist, jihadist, and less transparent)?
And if they choose to be “more like them,” what are the limits of American encouragement or coercive capabilities?

OK, that’s four questions, but when they are answered, the first priority that emerges is creation of a clear statement of American goals and desired outcomes. In the broader Middle East, the United States is engaged in lethal operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia while being at war with none of them, and in each, the outcome we seek is unstated.

As the military and diplomatic objectives are formulated, the second priority is “public diplomacy,” stressing what made/makes America what it has been and should be – a beacon of hope for people around the world. Individual freedoms including rights to property and to profit from one’s creativity and work; constraints on government enshrined in the Bill of Rights and the checks and balances of the system; free expression, including the right to criticize the government; and opportunity for all resulting in (at least relative) prosperity for most are what people admire.

This should not be confused with “democracy promotion” – a failed concept. The U.S. should promote and advance specific human rights and freedoms for citizens without trying to determine the nature of the political system of any country.

Messaging is a two-way street. On the one hand, the United States should be clear and vocal about what it does support, and on the other hand, it must be clear about threats to the American body politic contained in the messages of radical Islamist-jihadist ideology. The U.S. must develop strategy to discredit and defeat Islamic triumphalism that includes clarifying the expansionist-totalitarian nature of jihadism.

If one relies on Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy In America, the great strength of the U.S. in the nineteenth century was its mediating structures that maintained social equilibrium. By that, Tocqueville meant the family, the church, the schools and the associations – institutions that created coherence and solidarity without reliance on government.

However, a different America has emerged. As books like Charles Murray’s Coming Apart and Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic indicate, America is facing disequilibrium due to a host of harmful social trends.

The family is in disarray with the percentage of children living at home with two married parents in their first marriage going from 73 percent in 1960 to 46 percent in 2014. Illegitimacy rates have skyrocketed among most groups with 72 percent of Afro-American children born without fathers in the home. Labor force participation rates have sunk to levels last seen during the Great Depression.

The garment of social bonds is gossamer thin. Community volunteer activity is in decline and organizations like Rotary and the Lions Club are filled with aging participants. Mainline Protestant churches are devoted to a left wing social justice agenda, but lack a devotion to religious principles. Popular culture has been debased by vulgar and common-place boorishness. Fewer Americans believe in God than ever before and manners and morals have been buried beneath the tide of tolerance.

While some of these trends are worldwide the U.S. is still considered the “trendsetter.” As a consequence, nations view with interest the ability of the U.S. to overcome these new social contingencies in order to deal with the demands and expectations of foreign policy. For example, can the U.S. mobilize a fighting force large enough and committed to the sacrifice militaries in the past have exhibited? Or have Americans grown soft and uninterested in foreign commitments?

Chinese leaders are perplexed by conditions in the United States. There is the widespread belief that the cultural advantage the U.S. had is on the wane, but they are mystified by the rapidity of the change. Vladimir Putin believes – to the extent his beliefs are discernible – that the U.S. desire to withdraw from foreign commitments offers an opportunity for the enhancement of Russian interests, i.e. the restoration of empire. Iranian leaders are persuaded the U.S. under former president Obama’s guidance will do whatever it can to maintain the flawed and one-sided deal so that former President Obama can contend he avoided a war with the putative representative of the Shia people.