Tag: foreign policy

Can Trump Fix Our Broken Foreign Policy?

By the time most of you read this column, we will have a new US President. Donald J. Trump will be inaugurated for his second term today at 11:30 AM, Eastern time, and many Americans are hopeful that the disastrous foreign policy of the past four years under Biden will be improved. There is good news and bad news.

First the good news. It is no surprise that Trump’s appointees to foreign policy and national security positions are to the person very hawkish on China. However Trump, as he often does, has defied conventional wisdom on what his China policy might be by not only inviting Chinese leader Xi Jinping to attend the inauguration, but actually picking up the telephone and having a conversation with his Chinese counterpart.

According to a read-out of the call, the two discussed “trade, fentanyl, TikTok, and other subjects” and agreed to remain in regular contact. Winston Churchill is often (inaccurately) credited with the phrase “jaw-jaw is better than war-war,” but nonetheless it is an accurate statement. It is much better to engage even with “adversaries” than to refuse contact and add more sanctions. Those who prefer sanctions over communications are the true isolationists.

On TikTok, the popular application has credited Trump with preventing the Congressional ban from taking effect. If true, it is another good Trump move in favor of our Constitutional free speech guarantees.

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Exit stage left: Biden’s curious Cuba move

President Joe Biden’s January 14 removal of sanctions imposed on Cuba during the first Trump administration could have been a major step toward restarting Barack Obama’s policy of engagement if Biden had done it in his first week as president instead of his last.

But done at the last minute, they are unlikely to have much impact. Two of the three will not even take effect until after Trump’s inauguration.

Senior members of Trump’s incoming foreign policy team, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, and Special Envoy for Latin America Maurico Claver-Carone, have criticized Biden’s actions, noting that they can be quickly and easily reversed by the incoming administration.

“No one should be under any illusion in terms of a change in Cuba policy,” Waltz said.

Nevertheless, within hours of the White House’s announcement, the Cuban government announced that, in response to appeals from the Vatican, it would gradually release 553 prisoners, many of whom were involved in the nationwide protests on July 11, 2021. The deal was the culmination of three years of Vatican shuttle diplomacy.

Biden’s package includes three measures: (1) It rescinded Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM) 5, of June 16, 2017, the basic framework for Trump’s policy of regime change; (2) It suspends Title III of the 1996 Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act, which gives U.S. citizens, including naturalized Cuban Americans, whose property was nationalized by Cuba’s revolutionary government the right to sue in U.S. Federal Court anyone making beneficial use of that property; and (3) It initiated removal of Cuba from the State Department’s list of State Sponsors of International Terrorism.

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Joe Biden’s Bizarro World of Foreign Policy “Achievements”

Biden’s farewell boasts ring hollow as his foreign policy missteps—from emboldening Iran and Hamas to the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal—undermine his claims of global achievement.

 Departing President Joe Biden offered a farewell brag this week to his State Department about how his tenure had improved America’s stature abroad. In his now accustomed weird mix of whispering and fiery shouting, Biden apparently felt he had to lie or mislead about almost every one of his “achievements.”

Yet to the extent that anything improved abroad on his watch—the weakening of Iran or the near destruction of Hamas and Hezbollah—it was due despite, not because of, Biden.

Biden, bowing to election year political pressure, did all he could to restrain and block Israeli retaliations to the October 7 massacres. Only after he was repeatedly proven wrong does he now shamelessly take credit for what Israel ironically achieved by ignoring his own threats directed at Israel. Additionally, the Afghanistan withdrawal remains a significant marker of his presidency.

Biden is correct only that Iran is “weaker than it’s been in decades.” But Tehran was aided, not hurt, by Biden’s nonstop efforts to lift sanctions, to allow Iran to make billions in oil revenues, to pay the theocracy billions of dollars in hostage ransom, and to beg the mullahs to reenter the ill-starred Iran deal. Everything Biden did makes it much harder for Israel to survive.

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Micromanaging Foreign Nations: A Bipartisan Syndrome

If one thing is certain, there will be more uncertainty abroad. Yet most Washington officials believe their job is to manage the world, even the least minutiae involving other states. And the rest of the world’s job is to obey them. At a time of multiplying wars, U.S. policymakers continue to waste time, resources, and credibility on issues that are frankly none of America’s business. 

Consider Georgia in the Caucasus. It had the misfortune in 2008 to be ruled by Mikheil Saakashvili, who triggered an invasion by recklessly bombarding Russian troops, apparently expecting the American cavalry to race to his rescue. Even the war-happy President George W. Bush, however, wasn’t prepared to confront Moscow.

Today a new government is in power in Tbilisi. Derided as pro-Russian, it has won several elections and appears to be carefully balancing Moscow and Brussels, a far smarter approach. Yet it has been under siege of late. Claims of electoral fraud have been leveled without proof. Charges of excessive force against demonstrators are better grounded, although protestors also were violent. Another issue is the European Union, which younger Georgians are impatient for their country to join. 

None of this should matter much to Washington. Georgia is not a security interest for America. It has no notable economic, cultural, or historic connection to the U.S. Yet Washington joined Europe in funding groups backing Georgia’s entry into the EU. The Biden administration then was outraged when the Tbilisi government targeted foreign funding for domestic organizations, the sort of political interference that Washington politicians ritualistically criticize in the U.S. Indeed, the Georgian legislation looks like America’s broad Foreign Agent Registration Act. Rather than taking this as a sign of flattery, Washington suspended financial aid to Tbilisi, its position apparently that the U.S. is entitled to make secret contributions to influence other nations’ politics.

More recently, Georgia’s prime minister said that he was suspending discussions involving EU membership. Protests erupted. Last month the administration issued a statement, citing alleged threats to the freedom to protest, while calling on “all sides to ensure protests remain peaceful” (emphasis added), a tacit admission that protestors also had been at fault. Yet the State Department led with criticism of “the decision by Georgian Dream [administration] to suspend Georgia’s EU accession process” and concluded by reiterating “our call to the Georgian government to return to its Euro-Atlantic path.” The U.S., a great power a continent and an ocean away, was telling another Russian neighbor that it should ignore Moscow’s sensitivities and go all in with the West—even though the U.S. refused to intervene militarily on Tbilisi’s behalf in 2008 and, as demonstrated in Ukraine, would not do so today in the event of conflict.

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Trump’s Foreign Policy Agenda Must Start By Undoing Four Years Of Global Insolvency

As the second Trump administration prepares to take office, it faces a full slate of foreign policy crises and a limited capacity for dealing with them. For decades, U.S. foreign policy has been led by people who saw a world without tradeoffs. There was no need for prioritization, either among foreign policy goals or between domestic and foreign projects. America could have more guns and more butter, forever.

Even at the height of the unipolar moment, tradeoffs still existed, but now they are back with a vengeance. The Trump administration will have to deal with insolvency in its foreign policy, both in terms of material resources, as well as its attention. Strategy is about prioritization among various objectives and applying resources commensurately. The D.C. foreign policy establishment is bad at strategy.

In his 1943 book, US Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic, Walter Lippmann famously worried about the alignment of American ends and means. Solvency, Lippmann wrote, was achieved when “our power [was] adequate to our commitments.” Still, it was not merely balance that policy should seek, but “a comfortable surplus of power in reserve.”

Can anyone with a straight face argue that U.S. foreign policy is, at present, solvent? Much less that we have a comfortable surplus of power in reserve?

The questions answer themselves.

Since President Trump left office in 2021, the People’s Republic of China has eroded the U.S. military advantage each year. In Europe, U.S. policymakers deploy tumid prose to argue that unless Ukraine is capable of defeating Russia (it is not), Americans cannot be safe. For its part, Israel has consumed roughly $18 billion in U.S. military aid for its wars in Gaza and Lebanon. All this while Washington spends more than a trillion dollars per year on defense programs.

There is no slack capacity to draw from. The national debt is $35 trillion and growing. The Congress is racking up budget deficits in excess of $1.5 trillion each year. Unsurprisingly, forward-looking budget projections are absolutely dismal. With Medicare, Social Security, and interest on the debt largely off the table to close the gap, defense hawks have no stash of money into which they can tap.

Unfortunately, the insolvency of America’s allies and partners is, if anything, even larger. Taiwan, which faces arguably the worst threat environment on earth, spends a piddling 2.5 percent of its own GDP on defense, piling its insolvency on top of ours. U.S. policymakers have made matters worse by not prioritizing the provision of weapons to the island. Taipei is still waiting for roughly $20 billion of U.S. weapons it has purchased but not yet received, but the Biden administration made clear in June that its priority for weapons transfers was Ukraine, not Taiwan. As Biden put it, other recipients are “going to have to wait. Everything we have is going to go to Ukraine until their needs are met.”

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The Next President Needs a Foreign Policy Reality Check 

On top of ongoing conflicts in Europe and the Middle East and rising tensions in the Indo-Pacific, the next administration will inherit structural domestic and international obstacles that have been mounting for decades. Addressing these challenges while keeping our current U.S. foreign policy strategy on autopilot simply won’t cut it—it is time for a new approach. 

Since America’s victory in the Cold War, our national security elites in both parties have avoided asking fundamental questions about what missions the United States should be engaged in. These experts insist that maintaining a heavy military footprint across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia simultaneously is necessary for American security. 

Focusing on how to resource these missions without reflecting on their wisdom or sustainability misses the forest for the trees. Twenty years of open-ended nation-building efforts in the Middle East cost thousands of service members’ lives. These conflicts also came at the price of $6 trillion, damaged American military readiness, and aided our great power rivals by diverting our focus and energy.  

After decades of deficit spending, our national debt is approaching $36 trillion, a ten-fold increase from the end of the Cold War. After the COVID pandemic, our nation’s debt hadn’t been so large in relation to our economy since the Second World War. At this point, our interest payments alone are exceeding U.S. defense spending from this year. 

On top of these challenges, the trust funds for our biggest domestic programs—Social Security and Medicare—are on track to be insolvent in a decade and impose benefits cuts unless the next administration makes difficult domestic choices to secure their future.  

Taken together, the United States now experiences a strategic scarcity that our national security class has not had to deal with for generations.  

We cannot buy our way out of these constraints, as the Commission on the National Defense Strategy recently called for. Voters, especially in swing states, are already disillusioned with America’s level of involvement in conflicts abroad. Americans are not going to make the painful fiscal sacrifices needed to secure our financial future only to see trillions more squandered on flawed defense strategies.  

In the face of these challenges, Concerned Veterans for America’s new report, “Realism in Practice,” offers a fresh, disciplined path forward for U.S. foreign policy, rooted in assessing our strategic situation as it is, not as we might wish it to be. 

American strategic goals need to align with America’s available resources. Policymakers also need to use the right tools to achieve these goals, avoiding overreliance on an already overstretched, undermanned military. Our allies can and should take greater responsibility for their own defense. The United States needs to concentrate its military resources on regions most vital to its core interests, while relying more on diplomatic and economic engagement elsewhere.

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American Outreach to Middle Eastern Despots Is Shortsighted

President Joe Biden is an increasingly decrepit lame duck. A Washington fixture for more than 50 years, he is lost in time, believing that the U.S. is still the unipower and essential nation, enabling him to “run” the world. Those days, to the extent that they ever existed, are long past.

Biden has spent most of his term sacrificing the interests of Americans to benefit foreign governments. Particularly bad is the administration’s bizarre offer of a security guarantee to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s few absolute monarchies, headed by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. That would mean turning the U.S. military into a modern janissary corps, with American personnel acting as royal bodyguards. Apparently cooked up by the National Security Council staffer Brett McGurk, acting as Riyadh’s man in Washington, the plan continues to be pressed by Biden, contradicting the latter’s many embarrassing paeans to democracy.

Few Washington policy proposals are so loathsome and irrational. It is tempting to write the idea off as a product of Biden’s advancing dementia. Other administration officials lack that excuse, however. For instance, Secretary of State Antony Blinken claimed, “It would really change the prospects of the entire region far into the future.” Nevertheless, the so-called Abraham Accords are not peace treaties despite their strangely idyllic reputation, since none of the nations involved have been at war with Israel. Rather, the U.S. is paying Sunni Arab regimes to establish diplomatic relations with Jerusalem. 

The earlier agreements were bad for America. Bribes should not be necessary if a de facto alliance against Iran is in the interests of Arab countries and Israel. However, the former governments, despite long having back-channel relations with Israel, played the U.S. In exchange for recognition of Jerusalem, Washington expanded arms sales to the United Arab Emirates and recognized Morocco’s illegal conquest of Western Sahara. 

Biden would provide the Kingdom with a security guarantee backed by U.S. troops, along with a sweetheart nuclear energy deal. Americans would protect MbS, as the killer prince is known, while he imprisons and murders, and sometimes dismembers, his domestic critics, and attempts to coerce his neighbors. According to Washington’s magical thinking, heavenly peace would then take hold. Iran would surrender, allowing Riyadh to dominate the region. The Palestinians would yield, docilely acting as cheap labor for their Israeli overlords. After the lion and lamb laid down together, the U.S. military would be able to withdraw from the Mideast. Everyone would live happily ever after, especially the Saudi and Israeli lobbies in Washington. 

In fact, paying off MbS and his wastrel royal elite would be bad policy in almost every way.

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Biden’s ‘leadership’ is blowing the lid off two wars

President Joe Biden has called America “the world power,” and has referred to his “leadership in the world.” If Biden does indeed see himself as a, or the, world leader, then he has been disappointing in his job and has mismanaged it.

The world today stands on the brink of larger wars, even potentially world wars, on two fronts simultaneously. That is, perhaps, a more precarious position than the world has found itself in in over half a century, since the Cuban Missile Crisis, and perhaps longer. Then, the danger came from a single front: today, there is danger on two or even three.

The Biden administration seemingly subscribes to a foreign policy doctrine of nurturing wars while attempting to manage them so that they remain confined to America’s foreign policy interests and do not spill over into wider wars. But such fine calibrations are not easily done. War is sloppy and unpredictable. Though a nation’s plans may be well understood by its planners, calibration of what might push the enemy too far and cause a wider war depends equally on your enemy’s plans, calibrations, passions and red lines: all of which are harder to profile or understand.

What is more, the contemporary culture of the U.S. foreign policy establishment seems dedicated precisely to excluding the kind of knowledge and empathy that allows one to understand an adversary’s mind, and instead to fostering ill-informed and hate-filled prejudice.

Calibrating how far you can push militarily or politically without tipping the balance of containment and triggering full-scale war is dangerously worse than tricky. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah badly miscalculated how far the calibrated strikes and responses with Israel could go before a controlled conflict became a larger war. The price of miscalculation was his life and a war in Lebanon.

Successive U.S. and European governments, and the NATO Secretariat, calculated that they could, through a series of steps, expand NATO into the former Soviet space without triggering a military response from Russia. The result of this miscalculation has been a war that has been disastrous for Ukraine and severely damaging for Western interests and that risks ending in either Western humiliation or direct war between Russia and the West.

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The Failure of Biden’s ‘Just Say Don’t’ Foreign Policy

“Don’t.” That has been President Biden’s repeated message to Iran and Hezbollah in the year since Hamas attack Israel on October 7. Well, Iran just did. Again. That makes Tehran’s October 1 attack on Israel with about 180 ballistic missiles a test not just of Israeli resolve, but of American credibility. The United States should join with Israel in imposing, as national security advisor Jake Sullivan said, “severe consequences” on Iran.

The Biden administration’s strategy throughout the last year of conflict has been to seek de-escalation and avoid a broadening of the conflict wherever and whenever possible. That was the import of President Biden’s warning of “don’t” in last October, telling Iran and Hezbollah to avoid joining Hamas’s savage attack. He issued the same warning in April, as Iran was preparing to strike Israel.

The administration also backed up its warnings by deploying significant military assets to the region. That might have helped prevent a Hezbollah invasion of Israel a year ago, but that is about the extent his warning’s effectiveness.

Hezbollah attacked anyway, just from the air. Just a day after 10/7, it began raining rockets on northern Israel in a year-long war of attrition that has left over 60,000 Israelis homeless. Despite Biden’s warnings, Iran now has twice fired an unprecedented amount of missiles at Israel, which could have inflicted untold damage on Israel if they had penetrated Israeli airspace and hit population centers. Fortunately, Israeli and American air defenses neutralized them.

Indeed, Biden’s commitment to Israel’s self-defense has been admirable. His U.S. deployment of military assets has critically helped Israel in its defensive actions. But it is not just Iran that Biden has been trying to deter, it is Israel, too. And in that he has been far more successful.

Repeatedly, over the past year, Biden has said “don’t” to Iran, but Iran and its proxies did; Biden helps defend Israel, then tells Israel “don’t.” The Biden administration has opposed every Israeli action that would truly deter the Iranian axis and enable actual victory, such as the ground incursion in Gaza, the conquest of Rafah, and the killing of Nasrallah. After the April 13 Iranian attack, Biden told Israel to “take the win.”

The same pattern is repeating itself again.

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Kamala Harris’s Foreign Policy: Similar to Biden’s, but Even Worse

When asked on The View what changes she would make to Biden’s policies, Kamala Harris responded, “Not a thing that comes to mind.”

Beyond showing a lack of preparation for even the most basic interview questions, this answer confirms what many already suspected: Kamala’s policies would simply be a continuation of Biden’s, but worse.

Her administration would start at an even lower point than Biden’s, pushing more liberal policies that will only further exacerbate the foreign policy issues and conflicts currently threatening the country.

Biden’s foreign policy has been an absolute train wreck, from the botched Afghanistan withdrawal to weak handling of China, the disastrous Iran nuclear deal, the ransom payment to Iran, and his failure to address Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism.

His border and immigration policies, handling of Mexico, the Russia-Ukraine conflict, energy policy, and OPEC relations have caused gas prices to double.

On top of that, he’s mishandled North Korea and handed over the last U.S. military base in sub-Saharan Africa to a repressive military junta.

Chief among Biden’s greatest failures is the botched Afghanistan withdrawal in August 2021, which led to the rapid Taliban takeover, the abandonment of U.S. allies, and the deaths of 13 U.S. service members in the Kabul airport bombing. This catastrophe is the crown jewel in Biden’s Foreign Policy Belt of Failure.

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