Tag Archives: foreign policy

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Trump’s Folly: the deliberate decline of the U.S. Department of State

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“All diplomacy is a continuation of war by other means,” said Zhou Enlai, the first Premier of the People’s Republic of China.

President Trump seems to be leading America toward the reverse, where a series of ad hoc decisions, rather than a well thought out foreign policy, and decimation of the U.S. Department of State, may lead to catastrophe.

Dean Acheson, United States Secretary of State in the administration of President Harry S. Truman from 1949 to 1953, pointed out that the successful organization of power is achieved only by the harmonious merging of economic, fiscal, military, foreign, and weapons development policies.

The same principles apply today.

Effective foreign policy requires the application of talent across the board. You need the soprano, contralto, tenor, baritone and bass, the full chorus.

“In the world of policy realism, … effective diplomacy usually involves all four aspects: artful and encouraging language; the use of economic and non-economic sanctions as leverage to shift the opponent’s cost-benefit calculation; the delicate deployment of “or else” threats that credibly back up the diplomat’s commitment to resolve the matter, one way or the other; all backed up and informed by careful, all-source intelligence, Peter D. Feaver is a professor of political science and public policy at Duke University, argued in Foreign Policy.

I’ve worked in Congress on foreign policy issues and with the Department of State on treaty negotiations, and I’ve been privileged to know many of the talented people there. I believe strongly that in a rapidly changing and challenging international environment, it is essential that the United States have a strong, trusted Department of State with an experienced staff.

But Trump and his Secretary of State, Rex W. Tillerson, appear to be functioning as a two-man foreign policy band, destroying the department, pulling it down piece by piece, turning it into rubble.

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“I’m the only one that matters” in setting U.S. foreign policy, President Trump said to Fox News’ Laura Ingraham on Nov. 2, 2017

Tillerson has frozen most hiring and recently offered buyouts to seasoned career diplomats and civil servants in hopes of pushing nearly 2,000 of them by October 2018, according to the New York Times. His aides have fired some diplomats and gotten others to resign by refusing them the assignments they wanted or taking away their duties altogether.

Meanwhile, just 10 of the top 44 political positions in the department have been filled, and for most of the vacancies, Mr Tillerson has not nominated anyone.

With North Korea’s belligerent behavior a major U.S. concern, Trump hasn’t yet nominated an assistant secretary for East Asia or an ambassador to South Korea. With all the troubles in Syria, Turkey, Egypt, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, there have been no confirmations of Trump nominees to be ambassadors to any of these countries and there is no confirmed assistant secretary for Near Eastern Affairs at the Department of State.

With Robert Mugabe having been effectively deposed as President of Zimbabwe and a new president installed in his place, there is also no confirmed assistant secretary for African affairs.

On Nov. 15, 2017 , Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) sent a blistering letter to Tillerson criticizing him and the Trump administration for “…questionable management practices at the Department of State; the attitudes of some in the Administration on the value of diplomacy; declining morale, recruitment and retention; the lack of experienced leadership to further the strength and longevity of our nation’s diplomatic corps; and reports of American diplomacy becoming less effective…”

Another letter, this one written by Ambassador Barbara Stephenson, President of the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) for the December 2017 Foreign Service Journal, asserted “there is simply no denying the warning signs that point to mounting threats to our institution—and to the global leadership that depends on us.”

“Were the U.S. military to face such a decapitation of its leadership ranks, I would expect a public outcry,” Stephenson wrote. “The rapid loss of so many senior officers has a serious, immediate, and tangible effect on the capacity of the United States to shape world events.”

Another issue that should be of great concern, but doesn’t get much media coverage, is that the number of applicants taking the difficult Foreign Service test used to identify promising Foreign Service candidates has declined drastically.

According to Stephenson, “…more than 17,000 people applied to take the Foreign Service Officer Test last year…What does it tell us, then, that we are on track to have fewer than half as many people take the Foreign Service Officer Test this year?” The State Department has challenged Stephenson’s numbers, saying the number that actually sat for the test in 2015 was 14,480, compared to 9,519 that took the test this year. That’s a 34 percent drop.

Whoever is right, without a constant flow of new blood, the Department of State will wither.

Maybe that’s Trump’s hope. If it is, it’s seriously misguided.

As Stephenson wrote, “Where is the mandate to pull the Foreign Service team from the field and forfeit the game to our adversaries?”

 

 

 

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What Hath Obama Wrought? Drone Warfare in the Trump Era.

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President Barack Obama was going to be different.

“Eight years ago, Mr. Obama suggested a messenger from a dreamy, multicultural future,” said Adam Shatz, a Fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities. “America would be steered back on track, working with other countries to meet the challenges of what he often called an ‘interdependent’ world…”

“But it hasn’t worked out that way,” Shatz said. “Despite the best of intentions, Mr. Obama became one of the midwives of of this dangerous and angry new world , where his enlightened cosmopolitanism increasingly looks like an anachronism.”

One area where the dreamy optimism eroded was with the drone strikes carried out from operations centers around the world that President George Bush initiated and Obama escalated.

Pressed by public interest groups, in July 2016 the Obama Administration released its estimates of the number of civilians killed by drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya, all countries where the United States is not officially at war. The three-page report, titled “Total Number of Strikes Against Terrorist Targets Outside Areas of Active Hostilities”, said 473 U.S. drone strikes in those three countries during Obama’s two terms killed 64-116 civilians. The report also said 2,372-2,581 combatants were killed in U.S. airstrikes from January 20, 2009, to December 31, 2015.

The government acknowledged that its figures differed substantially from estimates by non-governmental organizations. The Long War Journal, for example, estimated 207 civilian deaths just in Pakistan and Yemen, New America estimated at least 216 civilian deaths in the two countries   and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimated that 380-801 civilians died during Obama’s presidency.

The U.S. defended its conclusions, however, asserting that:

  • U.S. government post-strike methodologies for determining combatant and non-combatant deaths were superior
  • The government relied on a more extensive collection and analysis of multiple sources of intelligence before, during, and after a strike, and
  • Some figures released by others have been tainted by the deliberate spread of misinformation by some actors, including terrorist organizations.

President Bush’s embrace of drone killings (he authorized about 50 non-battlefield drone strikes) stirred angry protests by liberals, but the massive escalation of drone strikes under Nobel Peace Prize-winning President Obama, including strikes on American citizens, hasn’t stirred up much public turmoil.

Until now.

Now, with President-elect Donald Trump about to take office, public debate and concern about the drone program is resurfacing in liberal circles.

“That any president has this kind of power is concerning on its own, but it’s even more alarming now that Donald Trump, who has praised repressive dictators like Vladimir Putin and shown little respect for things like international law and the Geneva Conventions, is going to be in the White House,” reported Vox on Jan. 10.

If Trump does go even more hog-wild with drones, a supine Congress, deferring to the Bush and Obama administrations, set him up for it by tolerating aggressive presidential behavior and being willing to watch passively as executive power was stretched beyond its constitutional bounds.

“…the truth is that both major parties under the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, have worked to remove the restraints on the presidency and drastically exaggerate its authority,” Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote recently in The Week. “If Donald Trump wants to wield nearly unlimited power, he’s seeking an office that provides it.”

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America First: of course.

When Donald Trump laid out his foreign policy agenda on Wednesday, April 27, many of the critical commentators latched on to his statement, “America first will be the major and overriding theme of my administration.”

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Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gives a foreign policy speech at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, Wednesday, April 27, 2016. ePhoto/Evan Vucci

“Trump’s New Slogan Has Old Baggage From Nazi Era” was the headline of a Bloomberg column. “America first” and the idea it represented — American neutrality towards the Nazis — has been largely banished from respectable discourse, the column said, in an attempt to discredit Trump.

Critics suggested that Trump was advocating a discredited policy that had been soundly rejected by Americans before WWII. It’s not that simple.

The fact is that until Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Americans were genuinely divided between interventionism and isolationism. Millions of patriotic Americans believed that it was not in the nation’s interest to get involved again in European turmoil. Some polls showed that in June 1940, American opinion was split two-to-one in favor of staying out of the war, even if it meant Britain losing.

Started on September 4, 1940, the America First Committee, which favored nonintervention in Europe’s war, had 450 chapters across the country at its peak.

America First’s most outspoken leader was Charles Lindbergh, famous for having been the first to fly solo across the Atlantic in 1927.

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Lindbergh speaks at an America First Committee rally in Oct. 1941

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, however, Lindbergh became active in the war effort.

As for America First, it was dissolved on December 10, 1941, three days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

I’m not a big fan of Trump, but attempts to discredit him by his reference to America First are off-base. The hard-headed philosophy of putting America first in foreign policy decisions is not obsolete and Trump’s foreign police prescription is not isolationist.

“No country has ever prospered that failed to put its own interests first. Our friends and enemies put their interests above ours, and we must start doing the same,” Trump said on Wednesday.

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the same thing, though in a different way.  “In a democracy as pluralistic as ours, the absence of an articulated ‘national interest’ either produces a fertile ground for those wishing to withdraw from the world or creates a vacuum to be filled by parochial groups and transitory pressures,”she said.

Ensuring a nation’s survival is a critical obligation of a leader in foreign policy. You will not be a successful leader of America if you recoil from the urgency of protecting the national interest, of making America first.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Washout: Hillary’s foreign policy experience does her no favors

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Hillary Clinton and her backers figure she’s got at least one advantage, public trust in her foreign policy experience and judgment.

Hillary tried to highlight that factor when she told a questioner at a recent New Hampshire town hall meeting, “When you vote for someone for president, you’re also voting for a commander in chief.”

But why, exactly, does Hillary, or anybody else, think her foreign policy experience is a plus when you review her screw-ups.

Consider:

Libya

Then: Hillary Clinton urged President Obama to back a military campaign against Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, over the opposition of Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and other national security experts.

Now: Libya has deteriorated into a virtual failed state run by hundreds of private militias. Eighteen months after the initial airstrikes, U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed in attacks by militants on a U.S. diplomatic post and a nearby CIA site in Benghazi. The North African nation has become a primary outpost for the Islamic State, which has exploited the chaos to take territory, train soldiers and prove its strength outside Syria and Iraq. Washington Post, Feb. 3, 2016

Iraq

Then: On voting in favor of a resolution to take military action against Iraq in the face of Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, “I believe the facts that have brought us to this fateful vote are not in doubt,” Clinton said in a Senate speech the day before the vote. “It is with conviction that I support this resolution as being in the best interests of our nation…It is a vote that says clearly to Saddam Hussein — this is your last chance. Disarm or be disarmed.”

“We’ve ended the war in Iraq,” Obama said on June 25, 2012, at a New Hampshire rally in New Hampshire. “I’ve kept the commitments that I’ve made,” he said in Iowa on Oct. 24, 2012. “I told you we’d end the war in Iraq. We did.”

Now:

Although the Iraq war has technically been over for more than four years, Iraqis are still dying in large numbers. The number of Iraqis seeking refuge in other countries has risen considerably as the conflict between the Islamic State and the Iraqi government and associated forces continues. The U.N. has described the violence as “staggering” and noted the Islamic State may be guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and possibly genocide.

A Jan. 2016 report by the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq also accuses ISIS of holding an estimated 3500 people as slaves across Iraqi territory, using many as human shields, and pressing 800-900 children into military service for the conflict.

Meanwhile, animosity Between Sunnis and Shiites is threatening the Iraq’s stability. Neighboring Iran, home to the world’s largest Shia population, is behind the country’s support for Iraq’s Shia-dominated government.

Syria

Then: Hillary Clinton joined President Obama in declaring that Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces would cross a “Red Line” if they used chemical weapons. On Aug. 11, 2012, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in Istanbul that it’s clear to the Assad regime the use of chemical weapons is “a red line for the world.” On Aug. 20, 2012, Obama said that the use or movement of chemical weapons by the Assad regime is a red line. “We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized,” Obama said. “That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.”

Now:

Under the banner of fighting international terrorism, President Vladimir Putin has reversed the fortunes of forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, which were rapidly losing ground last year to moderate and Islamist rebel forces in the country’s five-year-old crisis. Washington Post, Feb. 3, 2016

Today, 4.6 million Syrians are refugees and 6.6 million are displaced within Syria; half are children. World Vision

Syria’s civil war is the worst humanitarian crisis of our time. Half the country’s pre-war population — more than 11 million people — have been killed or forced to flee their homes. Mercy Corps

The conflict is now more than just a battle between those for or against President Bashar al-Assad. It has acquired sectarian overtones, pitching the country’s Sunni majority against the president’s Shia Alewite sect, and drawn in regional and world powers. The rise of the jihadist group Islamic State (IS) has added a further dimension. BBC

Russia

Then: In March 2009, Hillary Clinton presented Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with a red button with the Russian text “перегрузка”, which was intended to be the Russian word for “reset”. Clinton explained that she wanted to reset relations between Russia and the United States, to spur a new era of better ties. “The reset worked,” Clinton told CNN in August 2014.

Now: In March 2014, Russia decided “To hell with the reset” and annexed Crimea. This led to the installation of a pro-Russian government in Crimea, the holding of a disputed, unconstitutional referendum and the declaration of Crimea’s independence.

 Russia subsequently:

  • blocked a U.N. Security Council resolution on Crimea’s referendum
  • provided a Russian-made Buk missle to Ukrainian rebels who used it to shoot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board
  • granted asylum to Edward Snowden, who’s wanted in the United States for leaking information about National Security Agency surveillance practices.
  • Provided military support to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Hillary, a tested,  brilliant, strategic foreign policy expert the American people can trust? I don’t think so.