The Blog

2020-

2020-12-08 b
THE BIDEN ABYSS I
“That requires substantial investment to help build capable and willing allies, to negotiate and collectively enforce international rules and practices that restrain adversaries.”

Multilateral Dreamin’

The foreign policy establishment’s vapidities veil a substantive void. Their competence is bounded strictly by their experience, which is of personal success and public failure.

The prospective renewal of the establishment’s full powers in a Democratic administration secures its longtime foreign policy personnel’s influence; yet it also puts them in the position of trying to convince Americans that they would use that influence to accomplish something other than the diminution of American security that they delivered to us over the past generation. Unable to argue that the same actions and attitudes would produce different results, they mix generalities about multilateralism with straw-man characterizations of those who understand that foreign governments pursue their proclivities—not their private dreams.

They have another problem. The American people strongly approve of President Trump’s emphasis on an “America First” foreign policy, and will not look kindly on re-subordinating America to the establishment’s hobby horses.

Trump was elected to end pointless military adventures abroad. Whatever the establishment might prefer, nobody now is going to send U.S. troops to fight overseas, especially not in the Middle East.

He was elected to be “tough on China.” Returning to business as usual with China is the establishment’s top international priority. But public opinion has so shifted that candidate Biden promised to be even tougher on China. His administration will have to pretend.

The entire U.S. ruling class decried Trump’s bypassing the Palestinians to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. But that bypassing transformed the Middle East. Nothing so thrills the establishment like sitting down with “the Europeans” as senior partners. But the Europeans pull in different directions. Helping America is the last thing on their minds.

Published in Foreign Affairs, the establishment’s flagship organ, “Defense in Depth” by Kori Schake, James Mattis, Jim Ellis, and Joe Felter, may be the purest example of this genre. There is hardly a proper noun in it. It’s all fluff, the point of which is something like “we’re the experts, trust us.”

“International engagement,” the authors claim, “allows the United States to see and act at a distance, as threats are gathering, rather than waiting for them to assume proportions that ultimately make them much costlier and more dangerous to defeat,” and serves as “an early warning system that gives time and space to meet dangers when they arise.”

When was the last time anything like that happened? These credentialed historians might think of an example. All they come up with is, “The pandemic should serve as a reminder of what grief ensues when we wait for problems to come to us.” Did anyone warn us about the pandemic? Certainly not China, which hid the facts. And certainly not China’s plaything, the World Health Organization. In fact, the establishment decried Trump’s severance of travel from Asia and Europe. The authors pretend not to know.

They charge that, by concentrating on America’s interests we have been “allowing a long-tended garden to become choked with weeds.” What gardens, what weeds? Which do they want to pull, and how?

... What about the United States, Europe, Russia triangle? On the one hand, our establishment wants us to provoke the Russians. On the other hand, it knows that, were push to come to shove in the East, Germany especially would support us the way a rope supports a hanged man.

No. The establishment’s vapidities veil a substantial void. Their competence is bounded strictly by their experience, which is of personal success and public failure. Thus they will speak authoritatively amongst themselves. But America no longer listens.

The best comments on this genre may have come from, of all people, Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). Though smitten by the foreign policy establishment’s externalities for some years, Rubio most recently tweeted: “I support American greatness, and I have no interest in returning to the ‘normal’ that left us dependent on China.” Take progress where you can find it. (read more)

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