Category: News

Colin Dueck, writing in Foreign Affairs, argues that Rand Paul’s foreign policy does not seem to be on the ascendency, as some have assessed. Not only does the GOP establishment oppose Paul’s less interventionist take on national security policy, but even the supposedly Tea Party leaning Republican base (essential in any 2016 presidential campaign scenario) is hawkish at its core.

Using Walter Russell Mead’s categorization of the conservative electorate’s foreign policy, Dueck describes Paul as a “Jeffersonian,” someone who “emphasize[s] the need to avoid military interventions abroad,” is concerned about the “corrupting effects of international warfare and power politics on American traditions,” and advocates the United States “keeping to its own affairs and not intervening forcibly overseas.” Contrasted with this is the Republican/Tea Party base, who Dueck describes as “Jacksonian,” who are “intense nationalists who take great pride in the United States’ military and prioritize protecting its sovereignty, honor, well-being, and security in what they view as a dangerous world.”

“Jacksonians,” Dueck writes, “are generally skeptical of elite-sponsored legal, multilateral, and idealistic plans for global improvement — hence the surface resemblance to Rand’s views. But once their country is at war, threatened, or under attack, Jacksonians tend to be relentless and unyielding.”

In my post yesterday pondering whether or not Paul’s foreign policy views are on the ascendancy in the GOP, I linked to a recent Pew poll that found a majority of Americans think the U.S. should mind its own business in the world. Dueck, though, thinks the Pew poll’s “less reported findings” reveal the more interventionist leanings of the Republican electorate.

The practical and current policy implications of the distinction between Jacksonian and Jeffersonian tendencies within the GOP can be illustrated by drilling down into some of the less-reported findings of that same Pew poll from December. The poll found that 63 percent of Republicans want the United States to remain the world’s “sole military superpower.” A whopping 73 percent of Republicans believe Iran is “not serious” about addressing concerns about its nuclear weapons program. Some 80 percent of Republicans believe the United States is “less respected” than it was a decade ago. (It is unlikely that those Republicans view this as a good thing.) The highest foreign policy priority listed for Republicans was “protecting U.S. from terrorism.” Moreover, the December Pew poll found that 51 percent of all Americans view Obama as “not tough enough” on foreign policy and national security, 37 percent view him as “about right,” and only five percent view him as “too tough.” It is more than likely that the proportion of Republicans, specifically, who view Obama as “not tough enough” is well above 51 percent.

Continue reading “How Popular Are Rand Paul’s Foreign Policy Views, Really?”

Jacob Heilbrunn, editor of The National Interest, spoke with Chicago University professor and renowned international relations theorist John Mearsheimer about the apparent shifts in attitudes in both the country and in Washington on foreign policy issues:

I would submit two points of caution. First of all, whatever hospitality the broader GOP has afforded more libertarian-leaning Republicans like Rand Paul and Justin Amash on national security issues is very likely to dissipate once the party regains power in the White House. The party out of power typically does things in the opposition that it later backtracks on once in power again.

Secondly, public opinion tends to ebb and flow on the issue of war and peace. Like in the aftermath of Vietnam, a majority of the country is currently opposed to excessive U.S. meddling around the world and overwhelmingly opposed to another lengthy war. The Bush administration’s excesses, particularly in Iraq, pushed the electorate in this direction. But this could also be just another fluctuation. Public opinion tends to be fickle and could easily flip back in the war fever mode given the right (or wrong) circumstances.

The question is whether this popular lean towards less muscular foreign policy and the small GOP faction that opposes excessive interventionism can be sustained for the longer term and whether it can then manifest itself in actual policymaking (which is a whole other obstacle given the entrenched interests in the foreign policy community in Washington). I’m agnostic on that question.

In last night’s State of the Union speech, President Obama put the spotlight on one of his invited guests, Army Ranger Sgt. 1st Class Cory Remsburg, a severely wounded veteran who was nearly killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan. Here’s Reason‘s Nick Gillespie in Time on why using the wounded vet as a political tool is “morally dubious.”

The most emotionally powerful moment in Barack Obama’s State of the Union address was also its most morally dubious. The nation’s commander in chief drew attention to a wounded warrior while eliding any responsibility for placing the young man in harm’s way.

A record number of Americans – 60 percent – think the government is too powerful, says Gallup, which also finds a near record low percentage trusts the government “to do what is right.” Who can blame us? The government under Republican and Democratic presidents has spent virtually the entire 21st century sending young men and women to fight in ill-defined and unsuccessful elective wars. That’s bad enough, but then to use them as props in political speeches? That’s positively obscene.

Gillespie is exactly right. As I tweeted at the time, praising Corey for almost getting killed in a war zone that Barack Obama ordered him into is a bit off.

Praising wounded soldiers who fight in the country’s wars is an old pastime, stretching back to tribal warfare and the ancient Greeks. It is mostly an attempt to gin up support for state violence.

So when Obama paid tribute to our warriors “who risk and lay down their lives to keep us free,” he was not being genuine. Does having 50,000 U.S. troops in Germany really have anything to do with keeping us free? Or is it what policymakers, in their less public moments, have said NATO is all about, namely ensuring the U.S. maintains dominance over the European continent? Are the approximately 50,000 U.S. troops in Japan really there to keep Americans “free”? Or are they there, as in Europe, to maintain Washington’s dominance and, more lately, contain a rising China? Did troops really invade Iraq in 2003 to secure the freedom of Americans? Isn’t it true that the presence of U.S. troops in the Middle East motivated al-Qaeda to attack us on 9/11, and thus made us less secure and less free?

And if the troops in Afghanistan are there to protect freedom all the way back here in America, why does it look like we’ll be pulling out with none of our major objectives accomplished and the Taliban as strong as ever? Might Americans have been just as free if we pulled out in 2009, when Obama took office and when Corey was nearly killed? Wouldn’t Afghanistan be in approximately the same position it is now, with a weak government that survives on foreign aid and systemic corruption and a Taliban insurgency that, despite the vaunted surge, looks like it can break up the country?

By 1965, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had privately admitted the war in Vietnam was unwinnable, but necessary in order to maintain American credibility and prestige. The war in Afghanistan is very much the same. Soldiers sent to fight and die in Afghanistan are sent for the international reputations of politicians in Washington, to save face, to prove to the world that America will use force even in lost wars.

The greatest threat to Americans’ freedom doesn’t come from Germany or Japan or Iraq or Afghanistan. It comes from Washington. That’s why people in the Founding generation like James Madison said, “A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.” He also warned posterity that, “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” Thomas Jefferson described “standing armies” as a “menace to the liberties of the people.”

If Obama said something like that, it would have been a hard truth put to the country. Hard, but at least it’d be true.

The Obama administration seems to have made a decision long ago on how to deal with Egypt’s rocky, post-Mubarak transition; namely to keep it subtle and in the background. Washington intends to remain a player in Egypt’s strategic position, but as far as the domestic stuff goes, Obama is tight-lipped.

That is actually representative of what the U.S. approach to Egypt has been for years prior to its 2011 revolution. Prop up the regime in exchange for favoring U.S. interests and pretend like the domestic repression is unknown to us. Why? Because Egypt is too important to U.S. strategy (they claim).

Doug Bandow sums up:

Egypt is racing toward dictatorship. Gen. Abdel Fatah al-Sisi even arrested opponents of the proposed constitution in the January referendum. However, Washington always has been more interested in maintaining influence than encouraging democracy or promoting development in Egypt. Toward that end the U.S. provided more than $75 billion in “aid” over the years. In fact, the cash bought little leverage. Hosni Mubarak spent decades oppressing Egyptian citizens and persecuting Coptic Christians despite Washington’s advice to the contrary. Israel’s military superiority, not America’s money, bought peace. Cash for fancy weapons may have won privileged access to Egyptian airspace and the Suez Canal, but today the Egyptian military needs the U.S.—for maintenance on and spare parts for those same weapons—more than the U.S. needs the Egyptian military. [emphasis added]

I’ve made the recurring argument that whenever people in Washington speak of “U.S. interests” they are really talking about the interests of the state and the corporate entities closely tied to it, not, as it were, ordinary American people. But even if we buy into the notion of strategic interests that are to the benefit of the country, it appears the U.S. has none in Egypt. Washington continues to spend billions of dollars on a regime that is brutalizing its people and dismantling what little democratic structures have been built up since 2011. The only difference now is that it doesn’t benefit the U.S. at all.

As John Mearsheimer has explained, arguments that Egypt represents a vital U.S. interest are “unpersuasive.” Indeed, Philip E. Auerswald, assistant professor at George Mason University, and a research associate at Harvard University, has argued that the Middle East, far from being the vital strategic center of the world everyone chalks it up to be, is largely “irrelevant” to U.S. interests. “The Middle East just isn’t that important,” he wrote back in 2007.

Then again, as The New York Times reported in 2012, U.S. aid to Egypt helps keep the pockets of defense corporations nice and full.

Despite my harsh criticisms of the Obama administration’s policies towards the Asia-Pacific, I’m of the opinion that an actual shooting war between the U.S. and China is very unlikely for the foreseeable future. Like the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, real conflict was considered simply too costly to statesmen on both sides.

But John Mearsheimer, professor of Political Science at Chicago University, thinks “there is a greater possibility of the U.S. and China going to war in the future than there was of a Soviet-NATO general war during the Cold War,” Zachary Keck, writing at The Diplomat, sums up Mearsheimer’s recent comments at a DC gathering.

Specifically, the center of gravity of the U.S.-Soviet competition was the central European landmass. This created a rather stable situation as, according to Mearsheimer, anyone that war gamed a NATO-Warsaw conflict over Central Europe understood that it would quickly turn nuclear. This gave both sides a powerful incentive to avoid a general conflict in Central Europe as a nuclear war would make it very likely that both the U.S. and Soviet Union would be “vaporized.”

The U.S.-China strategic rivalry lacks this singular center of gravity. Instead, Mearsheimer identified four potential hotspots over which he believes the U.S. and China might find themselves at war: the Korean Peninsula, the Taiwan Strait and the South and East China Seas. Besides featuring more hotspots than the U.S.-Soviet conflict, Mearsheimer implied that he felt that decision-makers in Beijing and Washington might be more confident that they could engage in a shooting war over one of these areas without it escalating to the nuclear threshold.

For instance, he singled out the Sino-Japanese dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, of which he said there was a very real possibility that Japan and China could find themselves in a shooting war sometime in the next five years. Should a shooting war break out between China and Japan in the East China Sea, Mearsheimer said he believes the U.S. will have two options: first, to act  as an umpire in trying to separate the two sides and return to the status quo ante; second, to enter the conflict on the side of Japan.

Mearsheimer said that he thinks it’s more likely the U.S. would opt for the second option because a failure to do so would weaken U.S. credibility in the eyes of its Asian allies. In particular, he believes that America trying to act as a mediator would badly undermine Japanese and South Korean policymakers’ faith in America’s extended deterrence. Since the U.S. does not want Japan or South Korea to build their own nuclear weapons, Washington would be hesitant to not come out decisively on the side of the Japanese in any war between Tokyo and Beijing.

As I’ve argued, there is an alternative.

One of the hard truths about Washington is that Congress recklessly wastes billions of taxpayer dollars on weapons programs that the Pentagon says it doesn’t want or need. Congress does this to avoid the slight uptick in unemployment in their districts that might result from cutting portions of the defense budget.

In other words, defense corporations that get virtually all their revenue from government extort continued welfare payments because they employ people in states and districts across the country. Politicians put their own political careers ahead of doing what is right and sensible (i.e., cutting wasteful DoD programs).

Part of this is achieved through lobbying. These corrupt politicians get tens of thousands in campaign contributions to incentivize them against cutting off Lockheed Martin’s welfare benefits. But another part of their strategy goes beyond lobbying; they lie.

According to a new report by William Hartung of the Center for International Policy (via Veronique de Rugy), Lockheed Martin dramatically inflated the number of estimated jobs that would be lost due to cuts to the notoriously expensive and wasteful F-35 fighter jet program.

“Lockheed Martin claims that the 125,000 jobs created by the F-35” would be lost if the government cuts funding. But only 32,500 of those are directly related to the F-35 program. A more generous estimate from a University of Massachusetts study “would put total jobs generated by the F-35 program in the range of 50,000 to 60,000 jobs, or less than half the 125,000 jobs claimed by Lockheed Martin.”

So Lockheed Martin was warning elected officials of dire unemployment predictions if the F-35 was cut, but the estimates were exaggerated in a big way. And this isn’t a new tactic.

A study put together during the recent sequestration debate that was “commissioned by a top defense and aerospace trade association” – namely, the Aerospace Industries Association and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers – found that “a new batch of planned Pentagon spending cuts would cause 1 million jobs to be lost next year.”

The National Association of Manufacturers, another lobby group, repeated this finding, adding that proposed cuts would “increase unemployment by 0.7 percent, and decrease gross domestic product by almost 1 percent.”

But, as Lawrence Korb, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress wrote at the time, these lobby groups fibbed their numbers.

“To maximize their findings (and their political impact),” Korb writes, ”both studies assessed the effects of defense sequestration on every sector of the economy that could be hit by “induced effects,’ including secondary and tertiary effects like reduced consumer spending. As a result, the ’1 million jobs’ figure includes jobs in industries as distant from defense as ‘retail trade’ and ‘leisure and hospitality services.’”

And besides, Korb points out, “defense spending is not a jobs program.” At least, it’s not supposed to be.

As far as the health of the economy is concerned, defense budgets are a net drain. The jobs that these rent-seeking defense corporations maintain only show what big business can do with taxed and diverted wealth.