RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

President Trump has had a busy few days of Asia diplomacy, including his first post-inauguration phone call with China’s Xi Jinping on Thursday, a White House summit with Japan’s Shinzo Abe on Friday and 27 holes of golf with Mr. Abe on Saturday, followed by a joint press conference on North Korea’s latest missile launch. Unlike some of his earlier encounters with foreign leaders, this round demonstrated sobriety, careful planning and respect for allies.

The news out of the Xi call is that Mr. Trump affirmed the longstanding U.S. “One China policy” concerning Taiwan, which he previously said would be “under negotiation” with Beijing along with trade and other issues. Some of our friends in the media have portrayed this as evidence that the U.S. President is a “paper tiger,” citing Chinese officials who say Mr. Xi refused to speak with Mr. Trump until he softened his stance. But the substance of Mr. Trump’s shift isn’t surprising or dramatic.

Rather than embrace Beijing’s “One China principle,” which insists that Taiwan is part of China, Mr. Trump only endorsed the U.S. policy of acknowledging a Beijing-Taipei disagreement over Taiwan’s status, reserving U.S. judgment on the issue and calling for the peaceful settlement of disputes with the consent of Taiwan’s people. As has been true for decades, this amounts to little more than agreeing to disagree. It certainly doesn’t stop the U.S. from supporting Taiwan with means other than official recognition as an independent state.

Nor does it stop Mr. Trump from building on his December phone call with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen by boosting economic, diplomatic and military ties with the island. On the contrary, by signaling that he won’t risk a destabilizing clash with Beijing over a matter as sensitive as Taiwan’s independence, Mr. Trump will now be able to secure more support for a cautious but still expanded Taiwan agenda from leaders in Taipei, Tokyo and other friendly capitals.

Which brings us to Mr. Trump’s strikingly friendly summit with Mr. Abe, a display surely not lost on Chinese leaders who rightly identify the Japanese Prime Minister as a devoted opponent of their ambitions to dominate Asia. “We have a very, very good bond—very, very good chemistry,” Mr. Trump gushed at a joint press conference. “When I greeted him at the car, I shook hands, but I grabbed him and hugged him because that’s the way we feel.” This is a turnaround from Mr. Trump’s campaign-trail criticisms of Japan as a freeloading ally.

“We’re committed to the security of Japan,” Mr. Trump declared. He also echoed his defense secretary, Jim Mattis, in reaffirming that the U.S.-Japan security treaty covers the Japan-administered Senkaku Islands that China has swarmed with civilian and paramilitary ships in recent years. On trade, a potential sore point with Mr. Trump even in the best of circumstances, the two leaders punted to a bilateral working group to be led by U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and Japanese Finance Minister Taro Aso.

North Korea helped underscore the stakes of U.S.-Japan cooperation Saturday by shooting a Musudan intermediate-range ballistic missile into the Sea of Japan, its first test on Mr. Trump’s watch. Though not the intercontinental missile launch Pyongyang has promised, this was a reminder that its nuclear program is advancing on many fronts. Mr. Trump, fresh off the golf course and a candlelight dinner with Mr. Abe and their wives, offered a brief statement: “The United States of America stands behind Japan, its great ally, 100%.” Hear, hear.

Media tittle-tattle about President Trump’s telephone calls with foreign counterparts received new fuel last week after details leaked of a conversation with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. The usual anonymous sources alleged that when Mr. Putin raised the 2010 New Start arms-control treaty, Mr. Trump asked his aides what it covered—and then, once briefed, declared it to be one of those bad Obama deals he planned to renegotiate.

If so, Mr. Trump got the treaty right. From America’s perspective, New Start is an execrable deal, a product of Cold War nostrums about reducing nuclear tensions. Arms-control treaties, properly conceived and drafted, should look like George W. Bush’s 2002 Treaty of Moscow: short (three pages), with broad exit ramps and sunset provisions.

Although President Obama had considerable help from then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in this diplomatic failure, Russia was hardly blameless. Moscow subsequently exploited the treaty’s weaknesses to rebuild and modernize its arsenal of nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles, while Mr. Obama stood idly by. Republican senators opposed New Start’s ratification, 26-13 (three of them didn’t vote), as did 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney. Mr. Trump’s remarks are therefore squarely in the party’s mainstream.

Not so, however, are some of Mr. Trump’s comments—or at least the inferences drawn from them—on Mr. Putin’s political and military adventurism in Europe. Many Republicans worry that, rather than strengthening the international economic sanctions imposed on Russia for its belligerent incursions into eastern Ukraine and its 2014 annexation of Crimea, Mr. Trump may reduce or rescind sanctions entirely.

This apparent difference is no small matter. Legislation to codify the existing sanctions is pending in Congress. It has overwhelming—most analysts think veto-proof—bipartisan support. Commentators wonder whether the remarkable Republican solidarity on Mr. Trump’s cabinet nominations might be shattered if Russia policy is the first area in which the new administration faces off with the Republican congressional majorities.

The sanctions on Russia for its interference in Ukraine are already under assault in Europe: Germany, France and others appear close to succumbing to their apparently hard-wired inclination to sacrifice geostrategic imperatives for economic ones. Elections across the Continent this year may produce results even more favorable to Moscow (possibly, in part, because of Russian meddling). By contrast, the Baltic republics and other NATO members in Eastern and Central Europe are alarmed that Russia’s adventurism would increase if its Ukraine aggression were brushed aside and sanctions lifted.

Yet amid the breathless press accounts about Mr. Trump’s purported fancy for Mr. Putin, one thing is clear: The Trump administration’s policy toward, and even its strategic assessment of, Russia is still under construction. Most important, if the substance of Mr. Trump’s comments on New Start was accurately reported, it shows him resisting items on Mr. Putin’s wish list, and not for the first time.

Mr. Trump has, for example, unequivocally opposed Mr. Obama’s Iran nuclear deal. On Feb. 1, National Security Adviser Mike Flynn put Iran “on notice” that the deal was on life support. New U.S. sanctions against Iran underlined the point. The White House is reportedly considering listing Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization, which should have been done decades ago. Such a move would have a significant political and economic effect on Moscow’s military-industrial complex, particularly Rosoboronexport, its international arms-sales agency.

Washington should be also push back against Russia’s inserting itself militarily and politically into the Middle East by using the Syria conflict as a wedge. While Ukraine may seem an unrelated issue, it is not. Moscow’s diplomatic efforts to “solve” the Syrian conflict are in substantial part an effort to “help” Europe with the Syrian refugee problem, providing yet another inducement to wobbly Europeans to roll back sanctions. Any perceived American weakness on the sanctions would embolden Russian efforts to further penetrate the Middle East, increasing the dangerous, destabilizing effects of Moscow’s tacit alliance with Iran. CONTINUE AT SITE