Historically, there have been several American foreign policies. One of the main reasons that the world has so many issues with the United States is that their official policy can, and frequently does, fundamentally change without warning.Prior to the First World War, the United States was mostly (although not entirely) isolationist outside of what it deemed to be its sphere of influence under the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary. Life sucked pretty bad if you were from Latin America, but if you lived in Europe, Asia or Africa, you heard almost nothing from Washington.
Then President Wilson changed everything overnight in 1917. Henceforth, the United States would "make the world safe for democracy" and took an active part in redrawing the map at Versailles in ways that still haunt us today. After the Treaty of Versailles' defeat in the Senate, American policy immediately reverted back to staunch isolationism, where it remained until December of 1941.
World War II forever shattered the Congress of Vienna system of multiple spheres of influence and the world was essentially divided between the United States and the Soviet Union. American policy was suddenly everywhere at once, picking and choosing the leadership of even the most strategically insignificant backwaters lest the communists do it first. America sponsored horrid regimes throughout the world, but particularly in the Middle East, in ways that we'll probably be seeing the consequences of for several decades. Anyone who believes that you can transition from Mubarak or Gaddafi to instant democracy is probably delusional.
Most observers thought that the end of the Cold War would bring an easing of American power. Instead, the reverse was true. President Reagan, contrary to current popular Republican opinion, only resorted to military force three times in eight years. Since 1989 however, the U.S military has been in a state of constant combat deployment. Washington has been bombing somebody somewhere for almost twenty-two years now.
This has been problematic in that the application of force has been so arbitrary. The United States had "no opinion" on Iraq's border dispute with Kuwait, for example, until it did. The Reagan administration could tell Saddam Hussein through Donald Rumsfeld that it did not want Iraq's use of chemical weapons or its nuclear program to be an impediment to better relations. But the first and second Bush administrations could cite those very actions as justifications to attack Iraq militarily, again through the good offices of Mr. Rumsfeld. Genocide was unacceptable in the Balkans, but easily overlooked in Rwanda.
There was an even more fundamental policy shift after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Prior to 9/11, there had to at least be an overt act that would provoke the application of American might. That changed with the 2002 National Security Strategy paper, which said that the United States would engage in preemptive (although it was really preventive, and there's a significant legal difference) war to protect its interests. Moreover, it became the official policy of the United States to impose democracy by force wherever possible, regardless of the national history, geographical position or demographic make-up of the targeted country. The Bush Doctrine was little more than musclebound Wilsonianism.
Worse still, the definition of what constitutes an "existential threat" has been stretched to the realm of the ridiculous. Terrorism, for example, is a tactic. It is not itself a threat. And even if you assume the most hysterical possibilities to be an imminent reality - such as seventh century nostaligists acquiring and being able to utilize nuclear weapons - that does not, in itself, pose an existential threat. One bomb in a cargo hold (assuming that one could be deployed and triggered by a non-state actor, a dubious proposition at best) would not end the existence of the United States. It is therefore not an existential threat as the phrase is understood by anyone who speaks English as their language of choice.
This thinking is strategically dangerous, in that when you treat everything as a potential existential threat, you wind up defending nothing. No matter how strong a given country's economy is, its resources are always limited in terms of money and manpower. And the American economy, for a number of reasons, has been in slow decline for nearly forty years. We're only just now beginning to see the almost apocalyptic possibilities of it. The United States is entering the same situation that collapsed the Soviet Union and the British Empire before it: being militarily rich, but cash poor.
That being the case, Americans need to begin a sober analysis of what the existential threats it faces really are and how they might be properly addressed. That should be easy, but it is actually impossible in the hyper-partisan, hysterical and deliberately ignorant atmosphere of modern American politics.
It was into this cesspool of stupidity that the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, this week waded.
China’s nuclear arsenal poses the most serious “mortal threat” to the United States among nation states, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the Senate on Thursday.All of that is so pedestrian that I can't believe that anyone finds it to be controversial in the slightest, which is a pretty good indication of how naive I can be when I really put my mind to it.
In candid testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Mr. Clapper said he considered China the most significant threat among nation states, with Russia posing the second-greatest threat. He later clarified the comments by saying he did not assess that China or Russia had the intention to launch an attack on the United States.
The testimony contrasts with statements by Obama administration officials who have sought to highlight the dangers of Iran and North Korea while paying less attention to China and Russia.
Mr. Clapper said he does not assess that North Korea and Iran pose greater strategic threats because they lack the forces that Russia and China have that could deliver a nuclear attack on the United States.
North Korea has tested at least twice a multistaged long-range missile capable of hitting the United States. On Tuesday, Sen. James M. Inhofe, Oklahoma Republican, told a conference in Washington that analysts estimate that Iran would be able to deliver a payload by missile to the U.S. East Coast by 2015.Senator Inhofe has built himself a rather storied career of being skeptical about everything while actually knowing nothing. Unless, of course, the issue involves freaking everybody out about incredibly implausible threats, then he's every bit as panicked as the global warming alarmists he routinely ridicules are and his skepticism vanishes. It's a truly magical thing to witness and I one day hope to bring it to Broadway.
The fact is that the Iranians haven't yet been able to produce enough enriched uranium for a single deployable warhead despite years, if not decades, of trying. And developing a warhead is the easy part of a weapons program. A serviceable, even halfway accurate, intercontinental ballistic missile is technically challenging and extraordinarily expensive. This is why so few countries have ICBMs. Having said that, India plans to develop both ICBMs and SLBMs (submarine launched ballistic missiles), despite having no current strategic adversaries beyond the range of its current medium-range arsenal.
The idea that Tehran will have both a warhead and a delivery system capable of striking the United States in just four years is nothing short of a fantasy, and somebody should check Inhofe for a fever for suggesting otherwise. If you're going to say that in public, you may as well assert that Ayatollah Khamenei is 47 feet tall and farts processed plutonium. The two things are about equally true.
But let's assume that the senator is right. There is still absolutely no historical evidence that the mullahs of Qom are determined to commit national suicide to fulfill some undeclared strategic objective. And being one of the world's oldest continuous civilizations, there should be lots to choose from. Yes, I suppose that you could bandy about some of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's more bewildering public statements, but it's just as plausible that he's playing to the rhetorical cheap seats every bit as much as Jim Infofe is.
If Tehran was so enamoured with the idea of bring back Glenn Beck's beloved 12th Imam, it has had years of opportunity to do so by launching the chemical weapons that they already have at either Israel or American forces in the region, of which there is currently no shortage. Doing so would invite an immediate nuclear response, which should bring the "hidden Mahdi" out of his well post-haste. That notably hasn't happened, and there's no logical reason to believe that it would with the fewer than ten ICBMs that Iran isn't even likely to obtain in the near future.
The same is true, although to a much lesser extent, of Pyongyang. The purpose of the North Korean program is different in that the most imminent danger to that country is internal - the final collapse of the economy that takes the Kim regime with it. The regime has therefore used its atomic capability to wring concessions from the world community, specifically South Korea and China, to prop it up and avoid an unending exodus of starving refugees across their borders. The nuclear program is being used as a bargaining chip to prevent the collapse of the regime, not to precipitate it. North Korea is basically Cleavon Little in Blazing Saddles.
On the other hand, as charter members of the fabled Axis of Evil, both Tehran and Pyongyang were witnesses to fate of their supposed confederate, Saddam Hussein. They understand that Saddam was deposed and executed over weapons that he did not have or was unwilling to use, the logical extrapolation of which is that having said weapons and demonstrating the willingness to deploy them will prevent them from sharing his fate. Unlike the paranoid and mystical scenarios coming out of Washington and Jerusalem, that actually does make some semblance of sense.
Of course, you can always just assume without evidence that the Iranians and North Koreans are a combination of insane and not especially smart, despite them both having run circles around the U.S government for decades now. This is what passes for the conventional wisdom in policy circles, the Goddamned Liberal Media, and the halfwit blogosphere.
That brings me to Russia and China. More specifically, it brings me to Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong. Both were brutal and deviant paranoids who between them presided over the deaths of well over a hundred million of their own citizens. Both pursued aggressive foreign policies and were capable of bringing ruination to the world well beyond even the most fevered imaginations of anyone in Iran and North Korea. It was the declared policy of the United States that the acquisition of atomic capability by either was "unacceptable", meaning that something would be done about it.
Guess what? Both did and Washington didn't. And everything was just fine. As a matter of fact, Richard Nixon was able to play Beijing and Moscow against one another, which more than anything else was what brought about the downfall of European Marxism. The Kremlin, as it happened, could prepare to defend against a resurgent America or an antagonistic China, but not both.
However, both countries remain great powers and they have strategic interests of their own. China, in particular, sees itself as an emerging superpower and has begun to assert its interests in its own region. Of course, with the United States maintaining a dominant role there, the potential for conflict is heightened, particularly given Washington's policy of "strategic ambiguity" regarding Taiwan, which even the staunchest Republicans regard as a renegade province of China and have for forty years. Beijing is, as it always does, preparing for such an eventuality by expanding its nuclear forces and heightening their capability.
No one should be surprised to see Russia reassert itself after the humiliation of the Cold War's end. They are an extremely proud people and have survived wars with monsters far greater than anything the United States will ever be capable of producing. Even the worst conceivable American president couldn't compare with Napoleon or Hitler, the protestations of your average Tea Partier notwithstanding. Most Americans can't stop beating their chests about the 400, 000 troops lost in both theatres of the Second World War, but are willfully ignorant of the fact that the Russians saw 25 million die on the Eastern Front and were more responsible than anyone else in destroying Germany as an imperial power once and for all.
Amazingly, the strategic encirclement of Russia wasn't relaxed after the fall of communism. It was instead tightened further by an extremely reckless policy of NATO enlargement, growing even into the former Soviet republics on Russia's borders. As we learned during the Cuban Missile Crisis, this is something that the United States would never tolerate and would risk a nuclear holocaust to prevent. During the Yeltsin and early Putin years, however, the Kremlin wasn't in the economic shape to do anything about it.
That's not true now. Worse still, NATO has expanded well beyond the ability of the organization to protect itself short of nuclear war. That's fine, so long as you have the demonstrated political will to make the commitment, which NATO doesn't. While the member states might have been willing to lose Chicago or London to protect Berlin, no serious person suggests that they would be willing to do so for, say, Estonia. That might be a hard truth for some to accept, but it doesn't make it any less of a truth.
Not only is it natural for Moscow to test NATO's resolve, it is something that should have been expected. When Vladimir Putin saw NATO extend the possibility of membership to Georgia, he invaded and caught the Bush administration inexcusably by surprise. That, combined with NATO's continuing political and military debacle in Afghanistan, undermines the alliance's credibility and makes war more likely, not less, as Russia returns to its historical place in the world order.
Arms treaties are all well and good, but they do not supersede national interest, as was decisively demostrated when the United States abrogated the ABM treaty to begin development of its missile defense shield. In fact, that could have been another provocation in the eyes of the Kremlin.
All things being equal, there is absolutely nothing controversial about General Clapper's statements yesterday. China and Russia are, in fact, the most significant existential threats to American security. Moreover, both could rapidly become immediate threats if the relationships with them aren't managed in a way that understands and respects the vital national interests of everyone involved.
That can't be said of Iran or North Korea in the short or medium term, and anyone who knows anything about anything - which nicely excludes folks like Senator Inhofe and his amen choir at Fox News - knows it. Neither is capable of challenging American interests in a way that can lay the United States to waste and they won't be for decades, if ever. And that assumes that both regimes survive the next decade, which is unlikely, if for different reasons.
Having said that, the outrage about Director Clapper's analysis might be more dangerous than anything else.
First, if I were Moscow or Beijing, I would very much want the U.S government focusing their time, energy and resources on threats that barely exist in pissant sinkholes like Iran and North Korea. Whatever is directed there logically cannot be devoted to countering their growing power in a strategically smart way. And remember, the U.S might not be able to keep the lights on much longer. You may not have heard this, but they're $14 trillion in the hole already, in large part because they've spent the last half century thinking that everything everywhere is an existential threat.
Second, it diverts the attention of the American people from threats that have always existed and likely always will to fantastic bogeymen that cannot currently inflict much damage on them and likely couldn't be stopped even in the event that they had such a capability. After all, you're never going to stop a person or a state from committing suicide to kill you 100% of the time. In the case of a truly suicidal country (assuming that one even exists), I'm not sure that you can stop them at all.
Great powers, on the other hand, can be deterred. History teaches us this repeatedly. Stalin and Mao, despite the contemporary American rhetoric that they would willingly turn their nations into radioactive ash in the pursuit of their ideological fantasies, were deterred, and rather easily at that. I suspect that Putin and Hu are no different.
But that relies on knowing what the threats are, concentrating a political consensus on them, and clearly communicating what each side can get away with and what they can't. The United States was incredibly lucky to survive the potentially disastrous and wildly mishandled Cuban crisis. Counting on being that lucky twice is folly. And small misunderstandings about the other side's intentions have a historical tendency to rapidly grow into ruinous wars. That's exactly how the First World War started. Nobody thought that the assasination of some Austrian nobody would cause the greatest war the world had ever seen. Everybody was counting on the other guy to blink, and nobody did.
In closing, it might be a good idea to remember that if you focus all of your attention on the things that can't kill you, the things that can probably will. It might also be a really good idea for the American people to stop electing stupid people to high office. It was cute for awhile, but it's starting to get more than a little dangerous.
Hey, you know what? Writing this was more fun than most of what I've done in a long time! I know that it was really long - and I appreciate those of you who made the effort to get through it - but topics like this can't be coherently addressed in three paragraph posts, as people like Erick Erikson and his friends regularly prove, if only unintentionally.
I'm thinking of making this a regular feature, even with the amount of work it involves. And I might even write about people that I actually agree with most of the time, which I bet most of you didn't even think existed. I have some ideas about a recent op-ed by Michael Scheuer that I'm kicking around. I just don't know if I'll have enough time to do it while it's still somewhat fresh.
Anyhow, thanks to those of you who made it through a post this long and involved.
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