Month: May 2017
America First will put America last
Here, according to National Security Adviser McMaster and National Economic Council Director Gary D. Cohn is the essence of President Trump’s America First foreign policy:
In short, those societies that share our interests will find no friend more steadfast than the United States. Those that choose to challenge our interests will encounter the firmest resolve.
Like many policy statements, this one is more notable for what it omits than what it includes. Pursuit of national interests is a vital ingredient of any worthy foreign policy. But it is not the be-all and end-all.
Values are important as well. Their pursuit distinguishes the United States from many other countries and is, in my view, the essential and proper basis for American exceptionalism. We are a nation based on the proposition that all people are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. If you believe that proposition, you are condemned to pursue a foreign policy that is based in part on the values it embodies.
That is what America has done since World War II: through the Cold War, the unipolar decade, and the war on terror. Values have not always prevailed over interests, but they have been a serious factor that could be subsumed but not completely ignored. They are an indispensable basis for our alliances, especially NATO.
No longer. In Trump’s worldview, the world simply doesn’t permit it, McMaster and Cohn say:
The president embarked on his first foreign trip with a clear-eyed outlook that the world is not a “global community” but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage. We bring to this forum unmatched military, political, economic, cultural and moral strength. Rather than deny this elemental nature of international affairs, we embrace it.
This Hobbesian jungle makes even partial reliance on values seem a luxury, one this President thinks the United States can ill afford.
McMaster and Cohn also say Trump reiterated American commitment to Article 5 of the NATO Treaty, which provides for the common defense (usually abbreviated as “an attack on one is an attack on all”). He definitely did not do that. The allies noticed and are preparing themselves for a world without US leadership as a result. Trump’s worldview is a self-fulfilling prophecy: if you treat the world as a Hobbesian jungle, it will likely react like one.
This radical reorientation of US foreign policy away from its post-World War II dual focus on both interests and values is a radical departure, but it is not an innovation. Many countries act the way Trump wants America to act, feeling they can’t afford the values part. None of them however find themselves appreciated or followed the way the US is appreciated and followed, or at least has been until now. Rather than making America great again, Trump’s foreign policy aims to make America ordinary again. It will be just one of those nations engaging and competing for advantage. It will not be a leader or catalyst.
It should therefore be no surprise Trump is ready to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, which will relegate the US to renegade status in the eyes of much of the world. My colleagues tell me we are on track to meet the targets we ourselves set for reducing carbon emissions, largely because of the market-driven substitution of natural gas for coal in electricity production. So unless you think, as Trump does, that coal is going to revive magically, withdrawal now from the Paris agreement is pointless.
Trump hopes US withdrawal will cause the agreement to collapse, thus proving that his view of the world is correct. It won’t. Like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the countries involved are likely to realize that collective action will work even in the absence of the US, because values do really count. Nor will the rest of he world easily forget US abandonment of them. Recovery from Trump’s denigration of American values will be long and difficult. America First will put America last.
This is where America First foreign policy lands you (it’s Stu Jones, a professional former ambassador and acting assistant secretary for the Near East): in a long silence that speaks much more loudly than the illogical words that follow.
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Memorial Day for America and the Alliance
Donald Trump has done more damage to the NATO Alliance than the Soviet Union managed in more than 40 years. Even after its implosion, the Alliance endured for another 27 years, fighting its first wars in Kosovo and Afghanistan. It has taken only a bit more than four months for Trump to cast a pall over Europe’s most important link to the United States and to render the Alliance irrelevant.
German Chancellor Merkel has concluded that Europe, “to some extent,” has to go it alone. This was her reaction to Trump’s miserable performance at the NATO Summit meeting last week, when he failed to mention the Article 5 commitment to come to the defense of our allies and harshly criticized their failure to meet NATO’s exhortation that they spend 2% of GDP on defense. That guideline was intended for 2024, but Trump treats it as a treaty commitment and pretends that the allies owe arrears for their many years of not meeting it.
This purposeful mendacity has consequences. It has convinced the allies that they cannot rely on the United States. An important corollary is that they need not follow the US on other issues. Trump will soon discover that our allies have no interest in ratcheting up sanctions on Iran, for example, but instead prefer to continue doing good business with Tehran. Nor are the allies likely to line up and salute on the wars in Yemen, Afghanistan, and Libya. “All for one and one for all” has for decades meant Washington could “to some extent” depend on European backing for American initiatives worldwide. That presumption is now null and void.
Who benefits from this Alliance decay? Russia of course. The vodka flowed in the Kremlin last week. Trump’s own ineptitude and the consequent investigations have stymied his efforts to reach out to Moscow. He is nonetheless proving a useful pawn. Russian President Putin’s fondest hope is to throw NATO into disarray. Trump has done it for him, without any apparent quid pro quo.
The notion that the US or NATO would contest Russian action in Ukraine or Syria has evaporated. The consequences will be felt not only in those two countries but also in increased Russian audacity in the Baltics, the Balkans, Georgia, Moldova and elsewhere. I was just informed of a Montenegrin detained and expelled from Moscow. Apparently he was on an unpublished non grata list. We’ll be seeing a lot more of that kind of harassment. Putin will push until there is a push back, which he will have concluded isn’t coming any time soon.
He is correct. Trump is pushing back against his democratic allies far more than against any autocracy. His only real enemies at this point are what he likes to call radical Islamic terrorism and Iran, the two of which he has somehow managed to conflate despite their mutual sectarian enmity. Trump simply ignores the fact that Russia is increasingly aligned if not allied with Iran, not only in Syria. Nor does he pay any attention to the fact that Russia and Iran have never focused their attacks there on the Islamic State or Al Qaeda, but instead collaborated in launching the latest chemical weapons attack on more moderate anti-Assad forces.
This is a brave new world in which the president of the United States is not what I would regard as loyal to democratic principles, at home or abroad, or to our democratic allies. Memorial Day commemorates those who have died in the nation’s service. I feel their loss even more deeply when we abandon the ideals they were seeking to defend. This is indeed a sad Memorial Day for America and its allies.
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Back channels
Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and key adviser, is reported to have tried to set up a secret “back channel” with the Russians, using Russian communications and circumventing US intelligence agencies and the National Security Council. Is there something wrong with that?
Not necessarily. The president can set up pretty much any channel he wants. President Obama set up a secret channel with Cuba in preparation for normalizing diplomatic relations. He also set up a secret channel with Iran in preparation for the nuclear deal. Both these were kept hidden not only from the American people, but also from most of the bureaucracy, in particular much of the State Department. I don’t know about the intelligence agencies. It’s not smart to try to keep anything from them, as they may well pick up traces of it and blow a back channel the president values.
First problem: Trump wasn’t yet president when Kushner’s effort allegedly took place in early December. That makes it more analogous to the allegations against Ronald Reagan, who some allege encouraged the Iranians via a back channel to hold on to the American hostages captured in 1979 until he took the oath of office in January 1980. Those allegations have not been proven.
Second problem: It is illegal for US citizens to negotiate with foreign powers in a dispute with the United States, but the 1799 Logan Act has only once led to an indictment and no one has been successfully prosecuted. So that is an unlikely legal course of action, especially as the Russians seem to have rejected Kushner’s overture, unless the overture itself is regarded as the opening of a negotiation.
Third problem: A lot will depend on what Kushner wanted to use the channel for. Many of us–I count myself in this category–are coming to believe that both Kushner’s companies and Trump’s are heavily dependent on Russian investment in, and purchases of, real estate. I’m no lawyer, but my understanding is that American companies are required to do due diligence on investors and purchasers to ensure that their assets are not derived from criminal activity. Clean Russian assets of the size Trump needed after his bankruptcies, and that Kushner needed for his big deals, have got to be pretty rare.
So questions become: was the due diligence adequate? If not, were the Russians blackmailing Kushner or Trump, thus making a secret communications channel desirable even before January 20? Was the back channel being set up to negotiate improved conditions for Kushner or Trump companies, perhaps in exchange for support for Russian ambitions in Ukraine or Syria once Trump was in office? There are many other possibilities, but few of them are savory and some of them are downright malevolent. All are speculative and unproven at this point.
Fourth problem: Now that a serious Special Counsel has been appointed, we can expect the FBI to examine Trump’s and Kushner’s personal and campaign finances with a fine tooth comb. Trump will react to that angrily, obfuscating where he can and trying to disrupt and divert the investigation by throwing in other issues, in particular the leaks that Trump seems unable to stop despite his many threats. The effort at coverup may turn out to be just as important as the intended uses of the back channel. That’s certainly what happened in the Watergate case: the break-in was a problem, but the cover-up was a full-blown crisis that would have led to impeachment, hence Nixon’s resignation.
Nothing can lead to impeachment so long as the House Republicans remain loyal to a president they dislike and even despise. There is no telling how long that will last, but the smart money is betting at least through the 2018 election. It is just impossible to predict which straw will break the camel’s back. In Bill Clinton’s case, it was lying about Monica Lewinski, after years of far more serious allegations (none of which panned out). Trump has already survived far more than anyone would have predicted. He may well survive much more.
Or not. No telling. But Kushner’s back channel isn’t going away any time soon.
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From Bosnia to Iraq, with love
Some colleagues interested in Iraq asked what lessons had been learned from states that have emerged from a collapse of central authority. I was assigned Bosnia. Here is what I had to say:
- Central authority never completely collapsed in Bosnia. The internationally recognized government continued to exist in Sarajevo.
- But its authority did not extend during more than three years of the war to the three-quarters of the country controlled by unrecognized Croat and Serb military and governing structures, analogous in a way to Kurdistan under Saddam Hussein.
- Nor has central authority in Bosnia been fully restored, 22 years after the wars ended.
- Let me offer a short version of the story.
- After Croat (Catholic) and Bosniak (Muslim) “Federation” forces swept through western Bosnia in August and September 1995, the US peace initiative imposed a ceasefire.
- At Dayton, we rolled back the Federation forces from about 67% of the territory to 51% and accepted the governing authority of Republika Srpska on the remaining 49%. The Federation and Republika Srpska are two sub-state units of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
- This was done with the concurrence of Croatia and Serbia, Bosnia’s nearest neighbors. They were responsible for the war; peace could not be made without them.
- NATO initially deployed 60,000 troops, one-third Americans, to guarantee no reversion to war.
- We also created a thin central government with limited competences: foreign affairs, customs, currency, immigration, and a few other things like international communications and law enforcement.
- The currency used was the Deutschmark, as there was no possibility of agreement on anything else. As a consequence, there could be no: no printing of money and no devaluation.
- Under the Dayton constitution, this thin central government and the corresponding parliament were power-sharing arrangements: no important decisions could be made without all ethnic groups agreeing. This was repeated in the Federation down to the municipality level.
- Most responsibilities were devolved to the two “entities” created by the warring parties: the Federation and Republika Srpska. The Croat entity was to disappear.
- But that Dayton formula proved insufficient to create a functioning state. A civilian international community “High Representative,” designed at Dayton as powerless, was entrusted in 1997 with virtually dictatorial powers to fire officials and promulgate laws.
- From 1997 to 2006, he undertook the strengthening of the central government by fiat, with authority derived from a Peace Implementation Council in which the major powers were represented.
- With support from the NATO forces, he and the other civilian organizations he reigned over dismantled the separate Croat governing structures, organized elections, unified the army and defense ministries, the customs, the banking system, the license plates, and to some degree the courts, arrested war crime indictees, vetted the police, blocked broadcast of hate speech, instituted direct election of mayors, and beefed up the central government’s authority.
- This was vigorous international state-building backed by the stick of military force.
- The carrot was entry into Euro-Atlantic institutions.
- In 1999, four years after the war, a summit meeting in Sarajevo opened for all the countries of former Yugoslavia the prospect of membership in NATO and the European Union, a commitment that has been reiterated several times since.
- While Bosnia lags most of the rest of the Balkans in qualifying because of its still dysfunctional governing structure, incentives like a Stabilization and Association Agreement and a Schengen visa waiver have proven critical in thickening the authority of the central government.
- Present circumstances—which include Brexit, the refugee crisis, and a long recession as well as a decision not to admit any new EU members before 2020—have postponed the most important carrot and reduced its attractiveness, which accounts for a lot of the difficulties the Balkans, and Bosnia specifically, are facing right now.
- One other detail from Bosnia that may have some relevance to Iraq: the international community, in the person of an American “supervisor,” took on direct governing authority over the Brcko District, perhaps the most contested area during the war.
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It’s not going to be easy
Iran Friday re-elected President Rouhani, who pressed for and got a nuclear deal with the P5+1 (that’s the US, UK, France, Russia, China and Germany, aka the EU3+3), with approval from the Supreme Leader. During his electoral campaign, Rouhani prioritized market reforms, negotiation of further sanctions relief, attracting foreign investment, and an enhanced regional and international presence for Iran.
Rouhani’s chief opponent was hard-nosed conservative Ebrahim Raisi, who wanted to close off Iran from further cooperation with the international community and build its “resistance” economy. Adopting a populist tone, he promised an increase in welfare benefits and subsidies. Implicated in the 1988 mass execution of thousands of prisoners, Raisi is “the true face of the Islamic Republic,” according to Elliot Abrams.
Iranians rejected that true face: Raisi lost by 19 percentage points, in an election that reportedly drew 70% turnout. Though far from free and fair, since candidates were vetted and many eliminated by the Guardian Council, that’s a definitive result, especially as there were two additional candidates. The Supreme Leader may be delighted that Iranians returned to the polls and did not boycott or otherwise protest too much, as they did in 2009. He may even be satisfied with Rouhani, who is no liberal but rather a stalwart of the regime who attracted support from would-be reformers because of the nuclear deal and the opening to the international community. But Iranians are clearly dissatisfied with clerical domination and isolation from the rest of the world.
Should Americans be happy with the election result or not?
Elliot preferred Raisi, as the human rights situation in Iran has not improved during Rouhani’s presidency and Tehran has become bolder in intervening in the region. The interventions in Iraq, Syria and Yemen have not been a big strain. Iranians would have been far more likely to rebel against Raisi than Rouhani, and the international community far more ready to act. President Trump aligned with that view during his visit to Riyadh, when he backed the Saudis and their effort to organize the Sunni world to counter not only terrorism but also Iran. Confrontation, not Obama’s rapprochement, is now American policy.
Others think Iran is drifting in a more liberal, less religiously conservative direction that should be encouraged, not discouraged. Confrontation will make moderation less likely. Iranians seem to want pretty much what people in the West want: equality of opportunity, transparency, fairness, and rule of law. They oppose the corruption and cronyism that have become endemic in finance and the bureaucracy. Sharia has evaporated. The ideology of the Islamic Republic is fading. Few women are wearing even the hijab.
Of course both views can be correct: the hard core of the regime remains very much in place. Rouhani likely does have a better chance of extending its life than a hardliner like Raisi. But if the people of Iran see only hostile words and new sanctions, how likely are they to warm to the West?
Russia is the alternative, one with which Tehran has been developing stronger ties, especially in Syria. The Iranians like what they have seen of Russian weapons, even if the Russians think the Iranians militarily inept. Their marriage is one of convenience, not a real alliance, but effective enough on the battlefield in Syria. No divorce is likely. New sanctions on Iran, which Congress is contemplating, would not only drive Iranians towards Moscow but also split the Europeans from the US, as they want to continue doing business in Iran.
Iran’s growing power projection capabilities complicate the issue for Washington. Tehran has developed longer-range missiles (up to 4000 km) but has not yet much improved their accuracy. Intended primarily for use against Israel, the missiles can frighten a civilian population but cannot reliably hit military targets. Iran’s Shia militia proxies have strengthened over the past five years, including not only Lebanese Hizbollah but also Popular Mobilization Forces from Iraq and other groups from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Having been attacked by Stuxnet, Iran has quickly acquired cyber warfare and drone capabilities. All these capabilities are relatively inexpensive, difficult to counter, and readily deployed.
Like Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, Trump has gone from a diehard opponent of the nuclear deal to its de facto strong supporter. The Trump Administration would like to renegotiate it so that the restraints on Iran’s nuclear program do not expire. It is not, however, clear what the Administration is prepared to offer in return, or even what would be attractive to Tehran. Trump would have to do more to open US financial markets to the Iranians, or somehow get the Europeans to join in new sanctions, in order to get the better nuclear deal he promised during his campaign. What are the odds of that?
The bottom line: Washington needs to learn to do more than one thing at a time: keep the nuclear deal in place (or even extend it), counter Iranian trouble-making in the region, and encourage the Iranian people to moderate their Republic’s commitment to exporting revolution using its unconventional but economical capabilities. It’s not going to be easy.
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Concerned and uncertain
Pantelis Ikonomou, a former IAEA nuclear safeguards inspector who holds a PhD in nuclear physics from the University of Vienna, writes:
Nuclear capability is a key factor in global alignments and strategic balances. President Trump has upset both:
- He has failed to block North Korea’s nuclear program or insist on its adherence to the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT).
- He has encouraged US friends such as Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia to obtain nuclear weapons, in breach of the NPT, which could initiate such efforts by other middle powers, including Turkey and Egypt.
- During his visit to Saudi Arabia and Israel, Trump did not refer to a Middle East Nuclear-Weapons-Free-Zone, a goal set by UN Security Council Resolution 687 (April 1991) and reinforced in the 2010 NPT Review Conference. Neither did the US president urge the Saudis to abandon the notion of a possible nuclear capability under “certain circumstances,” as often expressed by Saudi Arabian officials.
- The US president has suggested abandoning the P5+1 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, which would end the related International Atomic Energy Agency monitoring mission that provides unprecedented transparency for the Iranian nuclear program.
- President Trump additionally disrespected basic international commitments (NPT article VI and the New Start Treaty) by planning to extend and upgrade the US nuclear arsenal.
These moves cast a shadow over the NPT, which is the cornerstone of global arms control and non-proliferation efforts. Lack of US adherence dramatically weakens the treaty, since universality is already its Achilles heel.
The May 2015 NPT review conference in New York failed to produce conclusions, which demonstrated the gap between the nuclear weapons states (and their allies) and the rest of the world. Most UN member states have now joined an effort to produce this year a legally binding global treaty to make nuclear weapons illegal. The objective is to pressure the nuclear powers to eliminate nuclear weapons.
German chancellor Angela Merkel at the Munich Security Conference this year questioned the President’s understanding of the UN and EU. She wondered “will we be able to act in concert together or (will we) fall back into parochial policies?”
Trump has not offered a clear vision of a new world order. Nor does he (and the rest of the Western world) appear ready to accept the ongoing redistribution of power and international realignments. Aristotle defined the “final cause” as “the end, that for the sake of which a thing is done.” Trump’s purposes remain obscure. The world remains concerned and uncertain.
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