Nothing is more difficult for the reasonable, settled, status quo state than to contemplate fanaticism. Those whose politics is determined by consensus and compromise become hopelessly unsettled in the face of single-minded zeal. The tendency is then to mistake it for irrationality. Ronald Reagan once famously referred to a group of regimes that defy the rules of international conduct as the “strangest collection of misfits, Looney Tunes and squalid criminals since the advent of the Third Reich.” Less than two years later it was discovered that Reagan not only had dealt with these Looney Tunes but, in the words of his former chief of staff, had been snookered by them.
Reagan’s list of loonies included Iran, Libya, North Korea, Cuba and Nicaragua. In fact, this is a list of small states that have tormented the US, delivering pinpricks that America has found impossible either to tolerate or prevent. Admitting this, however, is difficult. Easier to dismiss it all as the work of crazy states. Reagan was certainly right that these countries are “united by their fanatical hatred of the United States.” But that in itself is not proof of derangement. Hatred is a common, often useful, phenomenon in international relations. And fanaticism is a measure of passion, not irrationality.
But assume, for the sake of argument, that there are regimes—Hitler’s Germany, Amin’s Uganda, Khomeini’s Iran—whose ends are irrational. It is a mistake to think that because a state has lunatic ends, it must be clumsy, erratic or incompetent in carrying them out.
The fanatic can be both wise and wily. Indeed, the fanatic has a distinct advantage in choosing means. So utterly convinced is he of the rightness of his ends that he lacks ordinary inhibiting scruples in his choice of means. He need consider only their instrumental value, not their moral valence. Not for him messy moral conflicts when matching means and ends. Everything matches.
Zealotry, in fact, produces a kind of hyperrationality of technique. The trains carrying innocents to the Holocaust ran remorselessly on time. That is fanaticism’s special gift, its special horror: its ability to routinize, to rationalize, to bureaucratize murderous irrationality.
The coexistence of irrational ends and rational means is an enduring source of astonishment. It should not be. Once you decide to murder every Jew in Europe, Auschwitz follows logically. Once you have decided that the city is parasitic on the countryside (Khieu Samphan, leader of the Khmer Rouge, decided that at the Sorbonne and made it a tenet of his doctoral thesis), then the forced emptying of Cambodian cities at the cost of millions of lives follows logically. After all, the extirpation of parasites is a public service. Once you have decided, as did Ayatollah Khomeini, to redeem the Islamic world from idolatry, and once you believe, as he does, that martyrdom is the quickest way to the joys of paradise, then sending 14-year-old boys into the teeth of machine guns is by no means irrational.
This is not to say states cannot act crazily. It is to say we should not expect bizarre behavior from states just because we find their ends incomprehensible. In American dealings with Iran, for example, it is the US that has behaved erratically, even laughably. After all, who sent whom the cake?
It is not just wrong but dangerous to underestimate the rationality of regimes that profess the craziest of ends. The very designation “crazy state” inclines those sure of their own sanity to let down their guard. Europe catastrophically underestimated Hitler because he was plainly a madman. That he was. It did not prevent him from conquering Europe.
A corollary to the notion that the crazy state is incompetent is the notion that it must ultimately self-destruct. Americans keep waiting for that to happen to the mullahs, the Sandinistas and the rest of the world’s zealots. It is a wan hope. This century has not been kind to the notion that fanaticism must collapse from within. Generally, the crazy state does not self-destruct. On the contrary, it must be destroyed from without: Hitler by the Allies, the Khmer Rouge by Vietnam, Idi Amin by Tanzania. (In his last years Stalin was no less irrational than Hitler, if not quite as bloody. Yet far from self-destructing, his regime, having succeeded in war, extended its hegemony over a great empire.)
The authority of the charismatic despot who drives the crazy state rests largely on a myth of invincibility. That myth is best punctured from the outside. So long as the outside world cowers, accommodates and appeases, that authority grows unchallenged. Munich is the model. Once the outside world returns fire, that shock alone can be enough to shake the foundations of the despot’s power. The 1986 American air raid on Libya is the model. Its military significance was minimal. Its psychological significance was enormous. Qaddafi went into retreat. And not just on the terrorism front. Within a year, his demoralized forces were routed and expelled from Chad, perhaps the weakest state in Central Africa.
Which bodes ill for those hoping to see Iran curbed today. Iran is today’s paradigmatic crazy state: its ideology extreme and archaic, its leadership implacable, its population full of passionate intensity, celebrating martyrdom and incurring it. Sightings of moderates notwithstanding, the Iran of 1987 shows no sign of collapse from within. Moreover, its prospects of being punctured from without are slim. Since crazy states tend to be destroyed from the outside, their fate is often a function of their geography. Hitler had the misfortune of being located in Central Europe; his pursuit of Lebensraum ran up against the greatest powers of the day. The Khmer Rouge’s bad luck was to be living next door to an equally warlike Vietnam. Otherwise it would be killing to this day, assuming there were any Cambodians left to kill. Qaddafi had the misfortune of being hard by the Mediterranean, an American lake. And Idi Amin’s butchery came to an end after he had trespassed once too often on neighboring Tanzania, which muscled its way into Uganda and threw him out.
The mullahs have wisely taken great care not to provoke their powerful northern and eastern neighbors. Iran’s ambitions lie to the southwest, where, if it can just get past Iraq, it faces states so weak they hardly deserve the name. With hegemony over the Gulf, the oil and the holy places awaiting it in what is a veritable geopolitical desert, Khomeinism will push on until it encounters the shock of some irresistible outside force. Until then, Iran can be as crazy as it wants.
Time, September 21, 1987
The search, now 30 years old, for Iranian “moderates” goes on. Amid the enthusiasm of the latest sighting, it’s worth remembering that the highlight of the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages debacle was the secret trip to Tehran taken by Robert McFarlane, President Reagan’s former national security adviser. He brought a key-shaped cake symbolizing the new relations he was opening with the “moderates.”
We know how that ended.
Three decades later, the mirage reappears in the form of Hassan Rouhani. Strange résumé for a moderate: 35 years of unswervingly loyal service to the Islamic Republic as a close aide to Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei. Moreover, Rouhani was one of only six presidential candidates, another 678 having been disqualified by the regime as ideologically unsound. That puts him in the 99th centile for fealty.
Rouhani is Khamenei’s agent but, with a smile and style, he’s now hailed as the face of Iranian moderation. Why? Because Rouhani wants better relations with the West.
Well, what leader would not want relief from Western sanctions that have sunk Iran’s economy, devalued its currency and caused widespread hardship? The test of moderation is not what you want but what you’re willing to give. After all, sanctions were not slapped on Iran for amusement. It was to enforce multiple UN Security Council resolutions demanding a halt to uranium enrichment.
Yet in his lovey-dovey Washington Post op-ed, his UN speech and various interviews, Rouhani gives not an inch on uranium enrichment. Indeed, he has repeatedly denied that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons at all. Or ever has. Such a transparent falsehood—what country swimming in oil would sacrifice its economy just to produce nuclear electricity that advanced countries such as Germany are already abandoning?—is hardly the basis for a successful negotiation.
But successful negotiation is not what the mullahs are seeking. They want sanctions relief. And more than anything, they want to buy time.
It takes about 250 kilograms of 20% enriched uranium to make a nuclear bomb. The International Atomic Energy Agency reported in August that Iran already has 186 kilograms. That leaves the Iranians on the threshold of going nuclear. They are adding 3,000 new high-speed centrifuges. They need just a bit more talking, stalling, smiling and stringing along of a gullible West.
Rouhani is the man to do exactly that. As Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator between 2003 and 2005, he boasted in a 2004 speech to the Supreme Cultural Revolution Council, “While we were talking with the Europeans in Tehran, we were installing equipment in parts of the [uranium conversion] facility in Isfahan….In fact, by creating a calm environment, we were able to complete the work in Isfahan.”
Such is their contempt for us that they don’t even hide their strategy: Spin the centrifuges while spinning the West.
And when the president of the world’s sole superpower asks for a photo-op handshake with the president of a regime that, in President Obama’s own words, kills and kidnaps and terrorizes Americans, the killer-kidnapper does not even deign to accept the homage. Rouhani rebuffed him.
Who can blame Rouhani? Offer a few pleasant words in an op-ed hailing a new era of non-zero-sum foreign relations, and watch the media and the administration immediately swoon with visions of détente.
Détente is difficult with a regime whose favorite refrain, fed to frenzied mass rallies, is “Death to America.” Détente is difficult with a regime officially committed, as a matter of both national policy and religious duty, to the eradication of a UN member state, namely Israel. It doesn’t get more zero-sum than that.
But at least we have to talk, say the enthusiasts. As if we haven’t been talking. For a decade. Strung along in negotiations of every manner—the EU3, the P5+1, then the final, very final, last-chance 2012 negotiations held in Istanbul, Baghdad and Moscow at which the Iranians refused to even consider the nuclear issue, declaring the dossier closed. Plus two more useless rounds this year.
I’m for negotiations. But only if it’s to do something real, not to run out the clock as Iran goes nuclear. The administration says it wants actions, not words. Fine. Demand one simple proof of good faith: Honor the UN resolutions. Suspend uranium enrichment and we will talk.
At least that stops the clock. Anything else amounts to being played.
And about the Khamenei agent who charms but declares enrichment an inalienable right, who smiles but refuses to shake the president’s hand. When asked by NBC News whether the Holocaust was a myth, Rouhani replied: “I’m not a historian. I’m a politician.”
Iranian moderation in action.
And, by the way, do you know who was one of the three Iranian “moderates” the cake-bearing McFarlane dealt with at that fateful arms-for-hostage meeting in Tehran 27 years ago? Hassan Rouhani.
We never learn.
The Washington Post, September 27, 2013
“Whom the gods would destroy, they first tempt to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict.”
—Irving Kristol
The quixotic American pursuit of Middle East peace is a perennial. It invariably fails, yet every administration feels compelled to give it a try. The Trump administration is no different.
It will fail as well. To be sure, no great harm has, as yet, come from President Trump’s enthusiasm for what would be “the ultimate deal.” It will, however, distract and detract from remarkable progress being made elsewhere in the Middle East.
That progress began with Trump’s trip to Saudi Arabia, the first of his presidency—an unmistakable declaration of a radical reorientation of US policy in the region. Message: The appeasement of Iran is over.
Barack Obama’s tilt toward Iran in the great Muslim civil war between Shiite Iran and Sunni Arabs led by Saudi Arabia was his reach for Nixon-to-China glory. It ended ignominiously.
The idea that the nuclear deal would make Iran more moderate has proved spectacularly wrong, as demonstrated by its defiant ballistic missile launches, its indispensable support for the genocidal Assad regime in Syria, its backing of the Houthi insurgency in Yemen, its worldwide support for terrorism, its relentless anti-Americanism and commitment to the annihilation of Israel.
These aggressions were supposed to abate. They didn’t. On the contrary, the cash payments and the lifting of economic sanctions—Tehran’s reward for the nuclear deal—have only given its geopolitical thrusts more power and reach.
The reversal has now begun. The first act was Trump’s Riyadh address to about 50 Muslim states (the overwhelming majority of them Sunni) signaling a wide Islamic alliance committed to resisting Iran and willing to cast its lot with the American side.
That was objective No. 1. The other was to turn the Sunni powers against Sunni terrorism. The Islamic State is Sunni. Al-Qaeda is Sunni. Fifteen of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi. And the spread of Saudi-funded madrassas around the world has for decades inculcated a poisonous Wahhabism that has fueled Islamist terrorism.
Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states publicly declaring war on their bastard terrorist child is significant. As is their pledge not to tolerate any semi-official support or private donations. And their opening during the summit of an anti-terrorism center in Riyadh.
After eight years of US policy hovering between neglect and betrayal, the Sunni Arabs are relieved to have America back. A salutary side effect is the possibility of a détente with Israel.
That would suggest an outside-in approach to Arab-Israeli peace: A rapprochement between the Sunni state and Israel (the outside) would put pressure on the Palestinians to come to terms (the inside). It’s a long-shot strategy but it’s better than all the others. Unfortunately, Trump muddied the waters a bit in Israel by at times reverting to the opposite strategy—the inside-out—by saying that an Israeli-Palestinian deal would “begin a process of peace all throughout the Middle East.”
That is well-worn nonsense. Imagine if Israel disappeared tomorrow in an earthquake. Does that end the civil war in Syria? The instability in Iraq? The fighting in Yemen? Does it change anything of consequence amid the intra-Arab chaos? Of course not.
And apart from being delusional, the inside-out strategy is at present impossible. Palestinian leadership is both hopelessly weak and irredeemably rejectionist. Until it is prepared to accept the legitimacy of the Jewish state—which it has never done in the 100 years since the Balfour Declaration committed Britain (and later the League of Nations) to a Jewish homeland in Palestine—there will be no peace.
It may come one day. But not now. Which is why making the Israel-Palestinian issue central, rather than peripheral, to the epic Sunni-Shiite war shaking the Middle East today is a serious tactical mistake. It subjects any now-possible reconciliation between Israel and the Arab states to a Palestinian veto.
Ironically, the Iranian threat that grew under Obama offers a unique opportunity for US-Arab and even Israeli-Arab cooperation. Over time, such cooperation could gradually acclimate Arab peoples to a nonbelligerent stance toward Israel. Which might in turn help persuade the Palestinians to make some concessions before their fellow Arabs finally tire of the Palestinians’ century of rejectionism.
Perhaps that will require a peace process of sorts. No great harm, as long as we remember that any such Israeli-Palestinian talks are for show—until conditions are one day ripe for peace.
In the meantime, the real action is on the anti-Iranian and anti-terrorism fronts. Don’t let Oslo-like mirages get in the way.
The Washington Post, May 26, 2017
Clare Boothe Luce liked to say that “a great man is one sentence.” Presidents, in particular. The most common “one sentence” for George W. Bush is: “He kept us safe.”
Not quite right. With Bush’s legacy being reassessed as his presidential library opens in Dallas, it’s important to note that he did not just keep us safe. He created the entire anti-terror infrastructure that continues to keep us safe.
That homage was paid, wordlessly, by Barack Obama, who vilified Bush’s anti-terror policies as a candidate, then continued them as president: indefinite detention, rendition, warrantless wiretaps, special forces and drone warfare, and, most notoriously, Guantanamo, which Obama so ostentatiously denounced—until he found it indispensable.
Quite a list. Which is why there was not one successful terror bombing on US soil from 9/11 until last week. The Boston Marathon attack was an obvious security failure, but there is a difference between 3,000 dead and 3. And on the other side of the ledger are the innumerable plots broken up since 9/11.
Moreover, Bush’s achievement was not just infrastructure. It was war. The Afghan campaign overthrew the Taliban, decimated al-Qaeda and expelled it from its haven. Yet that success is today derogated with the cheap and lazy catchphrase—“He got us into two wars”—intended to spread to Afghanistan the opprobrium associated with Iraq.
As if Afghanistan was some unilateral Bush adventure foisted on the American people. As if Obama himself did not call it a “war of necessity” and Joe Biden the most just war since World War II.
The dilemma in Afghanistan was what to do after the brilliant nine-week victory. There was no good answer. Even with the benefit of seven years’ grinding experience under his predecessor, Obama got it wrong. His Afghan “surge” cost hundreds of American lives without having changed the country’s prospects.
It turned out to be a land too primitive to democratize, too fractured to unify. The final withdrawal will come after Obama’s own six years of futility.
Iraq was, of course, far more problematic. Critics conveniently forget that the invasion had broad support from the public and Congress, including from those who became the highest-ranking foreign policy figures in the Obama administration—Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Chuck Hagel and Biden.
And they forget the context—crumbling sanctions that would, in short order, have restored Saddam Hussein to full economic and regional power, well positioning him, post-sanctions, to again threaten his neighbors and restart his WMD program.
Was the war worth it? Inconclusive wars never yield a good answer. Was Korea worth it? It ended with a restoration of the status quo ante. Now, 60 years later, we face nuclear threats from the same regime that was not defeated in a war that cost 10 times as many American lives as Iraq.
The Iraq War had three parts. The initial toppling of the regime was a remarkable success—like Afghanistan, rapid and with relatively few US casualties.
The occupation was a disaster, rooted in the fundamental contradiction between means and ends, between the “light footprint” provided by the US Army and the grand reformation attempted by Coalition Provisional Authority chief Paul Bremer, who tried to change everything down to the coinage.
Finally, the surge, a courageous Bush decision taken against near-universal opposition that produced the greatest US military turnaround since the Inchon landing. And inflicted the single most significant defeat for al-Qaeda (save Afghanistan)—a humiliating rout at the hands of Iraqi Sunnis fighting side by side with the American infidel.
As with Lincoln, it took Bush years of agonizing bloody stalemate before he finally found his general and his strategy. Yet, for all the terrible cost, Bush bequeathed to Obama a strategically won war. Obama had one task: Conclude a status-of-forces agreement and thus secure Iraq as a major regional ally. He failed utterly. Iraq today is more fragile, sectarian and Iranian-influenced than it was when Bush left office—and than it had to be.
Like Bush, Harry Truman left office widely scorned, largely because of the inconclusive war he left behind. In time, however, Korea came to be seen as but one battle in a much larger Cold War that Truman was instrumental in winning. He established the institutional and policy infrastructure (CIA, NATO, the Truman Doctrine, etc.) that made possible ultimate victory almost a half-century later. I suspect history will similarly see Bush as the man who, by trial and error but also with prescience and principle, established the structures that will take us through another long twilight struggle and enable us to prevail.
The Washington Post, April 26, 2013
Ramadi falls. The Iraqi army flees. The great 60-nation anti-Islamic State coalition so grandly proclaimed by the Obama administration is nowhere to be seen. Instead, it’s the defense minister of Iran who flies into Baghdad, an unsubtle demonstration of who’s in charge—while the US air campaign proves futile and America’s alleged strategy for combating the Islamic State is in freefall.
It gets worse. The Gulf states’ top leaders, betrayed and bitter, ostentatiously boycott President Obama’s failed Camp David summit. “We were America’s best friend in the Arab world for 50 years,” laments Saudi Arabia’s former intelligence chief.
Note: “were,” not “are.”
We are scraping bottom. Following six years of President Obama’s steady and determined withdrawal from the Middle East, America’s standing in the region has collapsed. And yet the question incessantly asked of the various presidential candidates is not about that. It’s a retrospective hypothetical: Would you have invaded Iraq in 2003 if you had known then what we know now?
First, the question is not just a hypothetical but an inherently impossible hypothetical. It contradicts itself. Had we known there were no weapons of mass destruction, the very question would not have arisen. The premise of the war—the basis for going to the UN, to the Congress and, indeed, to the nation—was Iraq’s possession of WMD in violation of the central condition for the cease-fire that ended the 1991 Gulf War. No WMD, no hypothetical to answer in the first place.
Second, the “if you knew then” question implicitly locates the origin and cause of the current disasters in 2003. As if the fall of Ramadi was predetermined then, as if the author of the current regional collapse is George W. Bush.
This is nonsense. The fact is that by the end of Bush’s tenure the war had been won. You can argue that the price of that victory was too high. Fine. We can debate that until the end of time. But what is not debatable is that it was a victory. Bush bequeathed to Obama a success. By whose measure? By Obama’s. As he told the troops at Fort Bragg on December 14, 2011, “We are leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people.” This was, said the president, a “moment of success.”
Which Obama proceeded to fully squander. With the 2012 election approaching, he chose to liquidate our military presence in Iraq. We didn’t just withdraw our forces. We abandoned, destroyed or turned over our equipment, stores, installations and bases. We surrendered our most valuable strategic assets, such as control of Iraqi airspace, soon to become the indispensable conduit for Iran to supply and sustain the Assad regime in Syria and cement its influence all the way to the Mediterranean. And, most relevant to the fall of Ramadi, we abandoned the vast intelligence network we had so painstakingly constructed in Anbar province, without which our current patchwork operations there are largely blind and correspondingly feeble.
The current collapse was not predetermined in 2003 but in 2011. Isn’t that what should be asked of Hillary Clinton? We know you think the invasion of 2003 was a mistake. But what about the abandonment of 2011? Was that not a mistake?
Madam Secretary: When you arrived at the State Department, al-Qaeda in Iraq had been crushed and expelled from Anbar. The Iraqi government had from Basra to Sadr City fought and defeated the radical, Iranian-proxy Shiite militias. Yet today these militias are back, once again dominating Baghdad. On your watch, we gave up our position as the dominant influence over a “sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq”—forfeiting that position gratuitously to Iran. Was that not a mistake? And where were you when it was made?
Iraq is now a battlefield between the Sunni jihadists of the Islamic State and the Shiite jihadists of Iran’s Islamic Republic. There is no viable center. We abandoned it. The Obama administration’s unilateral pullout created a vacuum for the entry of the worst of the worst.
And the damage was self-inflicted. The current situation in Iraq, says David Petraeus, “is tragic foremost because it didn’t have to turn out this way. The hard-earned progress of the surge was sustained for over three years.”
Do the math. That’s 2009 through 2011, the first three Obama years. And then came the unraveling. When? The last US troops left Iraq on December 18, 2011.
Want to do retrospective hypotheticals? Start there.
The Washington Post, May 22, 2015
Historic. Such is the ubiquitous description of the climate agreement recently announced in Beijing between Barack Obama and Xi Jinping in which China promised for the first time to cap carbon emissions.
If this were a real breakthrough, I’d be an enthusiastic supporter. I have long advocated for a tangible global agreement to curb carbon. I do remain skeptical about the arrogant, ignorant claim that climate science is “settled,” that it can predict with accuracy future “global warming” effects and that therefore we must cut emissions radically, immediately and unilaterally if necessary, even at potentially ruinous economic and social cost.
I nonetheless believe (and have written since 1988) that pumping increasing amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere cannot be a good thing. We don’t know nearly enough about the planet’s homeostatic mechanisms for dealing with it, but prudence would dictate reducing CO2 emissions when and where we can.
However, anything beyond that, especially the radical unilateralism advocated by climate alarmists, would be not just economic suicide but economic suicide without purpose. It would do nothing to reduce atmospheric CO2 as long as China, India and the other developing nations more than make up for our cuts with their huge and increasing carbon emissions.
China alone is firing up a new coal plant every eight to 10 days. We could close every coal mine in Kentucky and West Virginia and achieve absolutely nothing except devastating Appalachia and, in effect, shipping its economic lifeblood to China.
The only way forward on greenhouse gases is global reduction by global agreement. A pact with China would be a good start.
Unfortunately, the Obama-Xi agreement is nothing of the sort. It is a fraud of epic proportions. Its main plank commits China to begin cutting carbon emissions 16 years from now. On the other hand, the United States, having already cut more carbon emissions than any nation on earth since 2005, must now double its current rate of carbon cutting to meet a new, more restrictive goal by 2025. In return for which, China will keep increasing its carbon emissions year after year throughout that period—and for five years beyond.
If this sounds like the most one-sided deal since Manhattan sold for $24 in 1626, you heard right. It becomes even more absurd when you realize that, according to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, China was on track to plateau its carbon emissions around 2030 anyway because of a projected slowdown in urbanization, population growth and heavy industry production. We cut, they coast.
The carbon emission graph is stark. China’s line is nearly vertical; America’s is already inflected and headed downward. The Obama-Xi agreement simply ratifies US unilateralism—the US line declines even more steeply, while China’s continues rocketing upward unmolested.
Proponents of the Obama-Xi deal will then point to a second provision: China’s promise to produce 20% of its energy from non-carbon sources by 2030. But China had already been planning to begin substituting for its immense use of fossil fuels (mainly by using nuclear power) because Chinese cities are being choked to death by their traditional pollutants—sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, mercury compounds, particulates, etc.
These are serious health hazards. CO2 is not. Whatever its atmospheric effects, CO2 does not poison the air. So in return for yet another Chinese transition that has nothing to do with CO2, Obama has committed the United States to drastic CO2 cuts.
Moreover, beyond substance, there is process. Or more accurately, its absence. What’s the structure to sustain and verify the agreement? Where are the benchmarks? What are the enforcement mechanisms? This is just a verbal promise. Nothing more. Sixteen years from now, China is supposed to remind the world of its commitments and begin cutting?
I repeat: I would unequivocally support a real agreement with the Chinese where they cut contemporaneously and commensurately with the United States and where there is built-in reporting and independent verification. Such a bilateral agreement would need to be internationalized by bringing in such rising powers as India, Brazil, Indonesia, etc. This would be a breakthrough.
Climate enthusiasts will say that I refuse to take yes for an answer. Of course I would take yes for an answer. But the Obama-Xi agreement is not yes. It is “check back with me in 16 years.” Aren’t the people advocating this deal the same garment-rending climate apocalypticists who’ve been warning of irreversible planetary changes beginning now, and the supreme imperative of acting immediately?
Except, you see, for China, the world’s No. 1 carbon polluter. It gets a 16-year pass.
The Washington Post, November 21, 2014
“The United States does not view Europe as a battleground between East and West, nor do we see the situation in Ukraine as a zero-sum game. That’s the kind of thinking that should have ended with the Cold War.”
—Barack Obama, March 24
Should. Lovely sentiment. As lovely as what Obama said five years ago to the United Nations: “No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation.”
That’s the kind of sentiment you expect from a Miss America contestant asked to name her fondest wish, not from the leader of the free world explaining his foreign policy.
The East Europeans know they inhabit the battleground between the West and a Russia that wants to return them to its sphere of influence. Ukrainians see tens of thousands of Russian troops across their border and know they are looking down the barrel of quite a zero-sum game.
Obama thinks otherwise. He says that Vladimir Putin’s kind of neo-imperialist thinking is a relic of the past—and advises Putin to transcend the Cold War.
Good God. Putin hasn’t transcended the Russian revolution. Did no one give Obama a copy of Putin’s speech last week upon the annexation of Crimea? Putin railed not only at Russia’s loss of empire in the 1990s. He went back to the 1920s: “After the revolution, the Bolsheviks…may God judge them, added large sections of the historical South of Russia to the Republic of Ukraine.” Putin was referring not to Crimea (which came two sentences later) but to his next potential target: Kharkiv and Donetsk and the rest of southeastern Ukraine.
Putin’s irredentist grievances go very deep. Obama seems unable to fathom them. Asked whether he’d misjudged Russia, whether it really is our greatest geopolitical foe, he disdainfully replied that Russia is nothing but “a regional power” acting “out of weakness.”
Where does one begin? Hitler’s Germany and Tojo’s Japan were also regional powers, yet managed to leave behind at least 50 million dead. And yes, Russia should be no match for the American superpower. Yet under this president, Russia has run rings around America, from the attempted ingratiation of the “reset” to America’s empty threats of “consequences” were Russia to annex Crimea.
Annex Crimea it did. For which the “consequences” have been risible. Numberless 19th- and 20th-century European soldiers died for Crimea. Putin conquered it in a swift and stealthy campaign that took three weeks and cost his forces not a sprained ankle. That’s “weakness”?
Indeed, Obama’s dismissal of Russia as a regional power makes his own leadership of the one superpower all the more embarrassing. For seven decades since the Japanese surrender, our role under 11 presidents had been as offshore balancer protecting smaller allies from potential regional hegemons.
What are the allies thinking now? Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and other Pacific Rim friends are wondering where this America will be as China expands its reach and claims. The Gulf states are near panic as they see the United States playacting nuclear negotiations with Iran that, at best, will leave their mortal Shiite enemy just weeks away from the bomb.
America never sought the role that history gave it after World War II to bear unbidden burdens “to assure the survival and the success of liberty,” as movingly described by John Kennedy. We have an appropriate aversion to the stark fact that the alternative to US leadership is either global chaos or dominance by the likes of China, Russia and Iran.
But Obama doesn’t even seem to recognize this truth. In his major Brussels address Wednesday, the very day Russia seized the last Ukrainian naval vessel in Crimea, Obama made vague references to further measures should Russia march deeper into Ukraine, while still emphasizing the centrality of international law, international norms and international institutions such as the United Nations.
Such fanciful thinking will leave our allies with two choices: Bend a knee—or arm to the teeth. Either acquiesce to the regional bully or gird your loins; i.e., go nuclear. As surely will the Gulf states. As will, in time, Japan and South Korea.
Even Ukrainians are expressing regret at having given up their nukes in return for paper guarantees of territorial integrity. The 1994 Budapest Memorandum was ahead of its time—the perfect example of the kind of advanced 21st-century thinking so cherished by our president. Perhaps the captain of that last Ukrainian vessel should have waved the document at the Russian fleet that took his ship.
The Washington Post, March 28, 2014
So what if, in his speech last week to NATO, President Trump didn’t explicitly reaffirm the provision that an attack on one is an attack on all?
What’s the big deal? Didn’t he affirm a general commitment to NATO during his visit? Hadn’t he earlier sent his vice president and secretaries of state and defense to pledge allegiance to Article 5?
And anyway, who believes that the United States would really go to war with Russia—and risk nuclear annihilation—over Estonia?
Ah, but that’s precisely the point. It is because deterrence is so delicate, so problematic, so literally unbelievable that it is not to be trifled with. And why for an American president to gratuitously undermine what little credibility deterrence already has, by ostentatiously refusing to recommit to Article 5, is so shocking.
Deterrence is inherently a barely believable bluff. Even at the height of the Cold War, when highly resolute presidents, such as Eisenhower and Kennedy, threatened Russia with “massive retaliation” (i.e., all-out nuclear war), would we really have sacrificed New York for Berlin?
No one knew for sure. Not Eisenhower, not Kennedy, not Khrushchev, not anyone. Yet that very uncertainty was enough to stay the hand of any aggressor and keep the peace of the world for 70 years, the longest period without war between the Great Powers in modern history.
Deterrence does not depend on 100% certainty that the other guy will go to war if you cross a red line. Given the stakes, merely a chance of that happening can be enough. For 70 years, it was enough.
Leaders therefore do everything they can to bolster it. Install tripwires, for example. During the Cold War, we stationed troops in Germany to face the massive tank armies of Soviet Russia. Today we have 28,000 troops in South Korea, 12,000 near the demilitarized zone.
Why? Not to repel invasion. They couldn’t. They’re not strong enough. To put it very coldly, they’re there to die. They’re a deliberate message to the enemy that if you invade our ally, you will have to kill a lot of Americans first. Which will galvanize us into full-scale war against you.
Tripwires are risky, dangerous and cynical. Yet we resort to them because parchment promises are problematic and tripwires imply automaticity. We do what we can to strengthen deterrence.
Rhetorically as well. Which is why presidents from Truman on have regularly and powerfully reaffirmed our deterrent pledge to NATO. Until Trump.
His omission was all the more damaging because of his personal history. This is a man chronically disdainful of NATO. He campaigned on its obsolescence. His inaugural address denounced American allies as cunning parasites living off American wealth and generosity. One of Trump’s top outside advisers, Newt Gingrich, says that “Estonia is in the suburbs of St. Petersburg,” as if Russian designs on the Baltic states are not at all unreasonable.
Moreover, Trump devoted much of his Brussels speech, the highlight of his first presidential trip to NATO, to berating the allies for not paying their fair share. Nothing particularly wrong with that, or new—half a century ago Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield was so offended by NATO free riding that he called for major reductions of US troops in Europe.
That’s an American perennial. But if you’re going to berate, at least reassure as well. Especially given rising Russian threats and aggression. Especially given that Trump’s speech was teed up precisely for such reassurance. An administration official had spread the word that he would use the speech to endorse Article 5. And it was delivered at a ceremony honoring the first and only invocation of Article 5—ironically enough, by the allies in support of America after 9/11.
And yet Trump deliberately, defiantly refused to simply say it: America will always honor its commitment under Article 5.
It’s not that, had Trump said the magic words, everyone would have 100% confidence we would strike back if Russia were to infiltrate little green men into Estonia, as it did in Crimea. But Trump’s refusal to utter those words does lower whatever probability Vladimir Putin might attach to America responding with any seriousness to Russian aggression against a NATO ally.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Sunday (without mentioning his name) that after Trump’s visit it is clear that Europe can no longer rely on others. It’s not that yesterday Europe could fully rely—and today it cannot rely at all. It’s simply that the American deterrent has been weakened. And deterrence weakened is an invitation to instability, miscalculation, provocation and worse.
And for what?
The Washington Post, June 2, 2017
At the heart of President Trump’s foreign policy team lies a glaring contradiction: On the one hand, it is composed of men of experience, judgment and traditionalism. Meaning, they are all very much within the parameters of mainstream American internationalism as practiced since 1945. Practically every member of the team—the heads of State, Homeland Security, the CIA, and most especially Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and national security adviser H.R. McMaster—could fit in a Cabinet put together by, say, Hillary Clinton.
The commander in chief, on the other hand, is quite the opposite—inexperienced, untraditional, unbounded. His pronouncements on everything from the one-China policy to the two-state (Arab-Israeli) solution, from NATO obsolescence to the ravages of free trade, continue to confound and, as we say today, disrupt.
The obvious question is: Can this arrangement possibly work? The answer thus far, surprisingly, is: perhaps.
The sample size is tiny but take, for example, the German excursion. Trump dispatched his grown-ups—Vice President Pence, Defense Secretary Mattis, Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson—to various international confabs in Germany to reassure allies with the usual pieties about America’s commitment to European security. They did drop a few hints to Trump’s loud complaints about allied parasitism, in particular shirking their share of the defense burden.
Within days, Germany announced a 20,000-troop expansion of its military. Smaller European countries are likely to take note of the new setup. It’s classic good-cop, bad-cop: The secretaries represent foreign policy continuity but their boss preaches America First. Message: Shape up.
John Hannah of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies suggests that the push-pull effect might work on foes as well as friends. On Saturday, China announced a cutoff of all coal imports from North Korea for the rest of 2017. Constituting more than one-third of all North Korean exports, this is a major blow to its economy.
True, part of the reason could be Chinese ire at the brazen assassination of Kim Jong Un’s half brother, who had been under Chinese protection. Nonetheless, the boycott was declared just days after a provocative North Korean missile launch—and shortly into the term of a new American president who has shown that he can be erratic and quite disdainful of Chinese sensibilities.
His wavering on the one-China policy took Beijing by surprise. Trump also strongly denounced Chinese expansion in the South China Sea and conducted an ostentatious love-in with Japan’s prime minister, something guaranteed to rankle the Chinese. Beijing’s boycott of Pyongyang is many things, among them a nod to Washington.
This suggests that the peculiar and discordant makeup of the US national security team—traditionalist lieutenants, disruptive boss—might reproduce the old Nixonian “madman theory.” That’s when adversaries tread carefully because they suspect the US president of being unpredictable, occasionally reckless and potentially crazy dangerous. Henry Kissinger, with Nixon’s collaboration, tried more than once to exploit this perception to pressure adversaries.
Trump’s people have already shown a delicate touch in dealing with his bouts of loopiness. Trump has gone on for years about how we should have taken Iraq’s oil for ourselves. Sunday in Baghdad, Mattis wryly backed off, telling his hosts that “All of us in America have generally paid for our gas and oil all along, and I am sure we will continue to do so in the future.”
Yet sometimes an off-center comment can have its uses. Take Trump’s casual dismissal of a US commitment to a two-state solution in the Middle East. The next day, US policy was brought back in line by his own UN ambassador. But this diversion might prove salutary. It’s a message to the Palestinians that their decades of rejectionism may not continue to pay off with an inexorable march toward statehood—that there may actually be a price to pay for making no concessions and simply waiting for the US to deliver them a Palestinian state.
To be sure, a two-track, two-policy, two-reality foreign policy is risky, unsettling and has the potential to go totally off the rails. This is not how you would draw it up in advance. It’s unstable and confusing. But the experience of the first month suggests that, with prudence and luck, it can yield the occasional benefit—that the combination of radical rhetoric and conventional policy may induce better behavior both in friend and foe.
Alas, there is also a worst-case scenario. It needs no elaboration.
The Washington Post, February 24, 2017