Foreign policy during and after the US election

With the US Presidential election coming in a week and a couple of days from now, I wish I had something particularly insightful to say about it.

But at this point, it’s basically all about get-out-the-vote efforts. The reporting on the polls has been confusing. Some polls are better than others and some polling methodologies are more to be recommended than others. This is one of many things the mainstream media could do a better job parsing for a general audience.

But the race looks to be close. The only thing that I find surprising about that is that Trump’s obvious cognitive decline and his increasingly fanatical and, yes, weird statements haven’t turned off more habitual Republican voters. Which is one thing that tells me that their really is a “cult” aspect to Trump’s support.

But most voters are not hardcore political junkies. (And those of us who might fall into that category can’t help but envy them sometimes!) And there typically is not a lot of party-switching in Presidential votes, so the actual number of “swing voters” who switch their Presidential party preference from one election to another is relatively small. But approval or not of one’s habitual party’s Presidential candidate can affect turnout in decisive ways.

The filmmaker and political activist has been reminding people for the last eight years that in swing-state Michigan, whose 2016 Electoral votes went to Trump when if they had gone to Clinton would have made Hillary Clinton President, there were tens of thousands of ballots in Michigan that selected Democrats in the “down-ballot” races but simply left the Presidential choice blank. Had they voted for Clinton, the last eight years would certainly have been different.

One feature of the commentary in these last weeks is that the American electorate is “moving right.” But since one of the most important issues in the Presidential race is abortion, and the Democrats’ position in favor of abortion rights is highly popular and has benefitted Democrats in elections since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision of June 2022 overturned the abortion rights secured 50 years earlier in the Roe v. Wade decision.

That issue certainly doesn’t look consistent with the momentarily popular theme of “the electorate is moving right.”

But one obvious possibility could be a shockwave for the election, even his close to Election Day: the outbreak of a full-scale war between Israel and Iran, to which Joe Biden would surely respond by declaring his unlimited support for Israel.

Biden’s foreign policy failure

The essentially uncritical support Biden has given to Israel’s and Benjamin Netanyahu’s war in Gaza and now in Lebanon and his targeted-assassination strikes on Iran, which Iran could have legitimately claimed as acts of war, is a real weakness for Kamala Harris’ campaign. Traditionally Democratic leaning Arab-American constituencies in the critical swing states of Michigan and Pennsylvania could decline to vote for her based on Biden’s horrible policy on the current Israeli wars.

If she wins, the abortion issue will probably prove to have been decisive, to the extent that the effect of one discrete issue can be measured. If she loses because of defections or non-participation by Arab-American voters and others in the Democratic base who are disgusted at Biden’s war policy in the Middle East, Biden’s foreign policy will have put Trump back in the White House.

Polls don’t seem to be showing Jewish voters, who typically lean distinctly Democratic, deserting from the Harris-Walz ticket over Netanyahu’s war. Jewish voters are not a one-issue bloc, though Donald Trump has invoked the anti-Semitic trope that identifies all Jews with Israel to threaten Jewish voters:

Former President Donald Trump said at an event in Washington aimed at fighting antisemitism on Thursday that if he loses in November, “the Jewish people would have a lot to do with the loss.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Trump said of Jews who vote for Vice President Kamala Harris. “Any Jewish person who votes for her should have their head examined. I find it hard to believe, part of it is a habit, I think.”

Trump said he should be polling at “100” percent with Jewish voters. “It’s going to happen. It’s only because of the Democrats’ hold or curse on you.” (1)

Trump’s comment that “the Jewish people would have a lot to do with the loss” was widely regarded as a threat, an anti-Semitic threat. There doesn’t seem to have been much attention to his suggestion that Democrats have put a “curse” on Jewish voters that makes them favor Democrats.

It’s America. An important Christian nationalist leader, Lance Walnau has also invoked magic as a tool of the Democrats:

Senator [and Republican Vice Presidential candidate] JD Vance of Ohio campaigned Saturday in Pennsylvania at an event organized by Lance Wallnau, a self-described prophet who has said that former President Donald J. Trump was chosen by God, defended the Jan. 6 attack and described Vice President Kamala Harris’s debate performance as “witchcraft.” …

Mr. Wallnau, an evangelical influencer from Dallas, has become a big name in the charismatic movement of Christianity. A corporate marketer who became a celebrity prophet, he applies his marketing skills to push prosperity gospel teachings and products .He is especially well known for the belief that Christians should influence or even rule society, from politics to media to culture to the economy.

In a recent online conversation about Ms. Harris’s performance at the debate earlier this month, Mr. Wallnau said that she could “look presidential.”

“That’s the seduction of what I would say is witchcraft,” he said. “That’s the manipulation of imagery that creates an impression contrary to the truth, but it seduces you into seeing it. So that spirit, that occult spirit, I believe is operating on her and through her, similar to with Obama.” [my emphasis] (2)

Yes, we have self-described religious “prophets” in the US who accuse the Democrats in also serious of using “witchcraft” against Republicans.

And, yes, it’s something of a (forgive the phrase) miracle that the US has survived as a nation as long as it has!

But its foreign policy is pretty battered at the moment:

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. [my emphasis] (3)

Trump is reckless and corrupt, and has no real concept of foreign policy beyond cutting deals for his personal benefits with autocrats he admires. But, despite surprises that his quirkiness may bring, he can be expected to essentially continue Biden’s unlimited backing of Netanyahu’s war – just as Biden continued sticking to Trump’s Middle East party which effectively gave up on any actual solution to the Palestinians’ chronic dilemma:

Trump ended his first year in office with a landmark foreign policy move to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The decision broke from a decades-long bipartisan policy for US presidents to abstain from making the assertion, and the move was met with outrage from segments of the international community, including the Arab and Muslim world.

The businessman-turned-president then capitalised on this move months later by moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

In March 2019, he signed an executive order recognising Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Syrian Golan Heights.

His policy shifts on Israel didn't just focus on Israel's claims on occupied land either, as the Trump administration also withdrew from the United Nations Human Rights Council, citing that the international body showed negative bias when it came to Israel.

One of his last moves in favour of Israel was to declare that products from illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank had to be labelled "Made in Israel".

Trump also moved to further weaken the position of Palestinian leadership. …

After leaving office in 2021, reporters released snippets of Trump's conversations within the White House, which painted a picture that made it seem Trump had more scorn for Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu than Palestininian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

Yet the policies pursued by Trump broke away from decades of American precedent, in order to aid Israel, as it continued to breach international law with the expansion of illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. [my emphasis] (4)

Trump’s foreign policy, to the extent it has any coherence at all beyond enriching himself, is basically a fairly primitive unilateralism and militarism.

And to the extent he has any strategic perspective on nuclear proliferation at all, none of it involves improving the arrangements nuclear proliferation:

While in office, Trump threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea and then tried (and failed) to get a nuclear deal with its leader, Kim Jong Un. Trump walked away from a successful deal with Iran, only to see Tehran then accelerate its nuclear program. He withdrew from one arms control treaty with Russia and then refused to extend another. He considered resuming US nuclear testing, which would have violated yet another global pact. In short, Trump did on nuclear policy what he did on so much else: create chaos and undermine the rule of law. [my emphasis] (5)

Kamala Harris has given no clear indication that she will depart from the Biden Administration’s foreign policy on Ukraine or the Middle East. Although in both cases it’s urgent that the US adopt a more constructive and peace-orientated position. And in both those cases, it would make good, hard-headed practical sense to do so.

As Tom Engelhardt recently observed:

[I]f you want a measurement of just how far the Lone Superpower [the US] has fallen, keep in mind that, once upon a time not so terribly long ago, an Israeli leader like Benjamin Netanyahu would never have dared to pay so little attention to the desires of Washington when it came to his actions in the Middle East. Once upon a time, a figure like Netanyahu couldn’t have ignored the wishes of the top officials of the very country still arming his own in a staggering fashion, while doing whatever he damn well pleased to tear his region to shreds. (6)

And it’s hard to argue with this conclusion of his:

Trump’s very victory in 2016 should … have instantly been seen as the functional definition of American imperial decline — a crucial sign of the weakening and potential collapse of this country’s position in the world translated into domestic politics. And an election victory this November could, in the end, mean both the figurative and literal bankruptcy of the American system, while his defeat, in a nation now armed to the teeth, could give chaos a new name in the imperial homeland.

Notes:

(1) McCraw, Meridith (2024): Trump warns Jewish voters they’ll be partly to blame if he loses Político 09/19/2024. <https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/19/trump-jewish-voters-blame-00180177> (Accessed: 2024-25-10).

(2) Dias, Elizabeth & Cameron, Chris (2024): Vance Appears at Event of Evangelical Leader Who Spoke of Harris’s ‘Witchcraft’. New York Times 09/28/2024. <https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/28/us/politics/vance-lance-wallnau-witchcraft.html> (Accessed: 2024-25-10).

(3) Lieven, Anatol & Snider, Ted (2024): Biden's 'leadership' is blowing the lid off two wars. Responsible Statecraft 10/23/2024. <https://responsiblestatecraft.org/joe-biden/> (Accessed: 2024-25-10).

(4) Farooq, Umar A. (2024): Donald Trump: His diplomatic legacy in Israel, Palestine and the Middle East. Middle East Eye 10/25/2024. <https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/donald-trump-middle-east-foreign-policy> (Accessed: 2024-25-10).

(5) Collina, Tom Z. (2024): What Would Donald Trump Do on Nuclear Weapons? The National Interest 08/01/2024. <https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/what-would-donald-trump-do-nuclear-weapons-212136> (Accessed: 2024-25-10).

(6) Engelhardt, Tom (2024): The Empire Is Going Down: But What Isn't? TomDispatch 10/20/2024. <https://tomdispatch.com/the-empire-is-going-down/> (Accessed: 2024-25-10).

Jake Sullivan's "Foreign Affairs" article on US foreign policy in light of the Israel-Gaza War

It seems pretty clear here near the end of Biden’s first three years that to a large extent the Administration’s foreign policy approach has been one of inertia, continuing the “strategic pivot” to China that the Obama Administration officially began in a less blundering and incompetent manner than that of the Trump Administration.

Full post: https://brucemillerca.substack.com/p/jake-sullivans-foreign-affairs-article

What kind of post-Trump, post America-Alone foreign policy might we expect from Biden-Harris

John Feffer attempts some pre-Inauguration tea-leaf-reading on the Biden-Harris foreign policy in Biden Won’t Reset U.S. Foreign Policy On His Own Foreign Policy in Focus 12/03/2020.

[T]he world has moved on from 2016. The Trump team has left messes pretty much everywhere it camped around the world. A two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian stand-off has become ever more remote. The Iranians are understandably wary of U.S. promises of reengagement, and the reformists might only be in power for another half year in any case, pending an early summer election. Europeans are increasingly skeptical of relying on the United States for anything. China is hedging its bets after several years of more hostile U.S. policy.

Biden’s foreign policy team will have to navigate this new world. Their intentions — good, bad, indifferent — may end up mattering very little as they come up against the new geopolitical realities. [my emphasis]

Feffer notes several areas in which Biden will have the ability to make substantial policy changes without Congressional approval. This is important, because we have no reason to expect Tea-Party-on-steroids level of obstruction from QAnon-ized Republican Party of today.

As long as the Biden administration doesn’t need to push a treaty through the Senate, it will have a relatively free hand on foreign policy. It can rejoin the World Health Organization and the Paris climate accord. It can lift restrictions on travel and remittances to Cuba. It can negotiate its way back into the Iran nuclear deal. It can extend the New START treaty with Russia. Republicans can squawk all they want. It will be their turn once again to feel helpless in the face of executive power. [my emphasis]

Feffer also has these messaging suggestions for advocates of a progressive peace policy:

• Our efforts to reduce carbon emissions have to be framed as a massive jobs bill connected to the creation of clean energy infrastructure.
• Our desire to avoid a Cold War with China begins with the removal of tariffs that ultimately hurt U.S. farmers and manufacturers and continues with cooperation in clean energy that grows that sector in both countries.
• A détente with Cuba and a nuclear deal with Iran both give U.S. businesses a leg up in both countries and thus also can have job-creation potential domestically. [my emphasis]

One hopeful policy item is the Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA). As Trita Parsi writes in House Dems unite to support the Iran nuclear deal Responsible Statecraft 12/11/2020, there are strong signs that House Democrats will be supportive of a return to the agreement.

And Iran is initially making positive diplomatic signals on the deal, as Juan Cole discusses in Iran’s Pres. Rouhani to Biden: We will Fulfill our Nuclear Obligations on Day One if you Return to 2015 Deal Informed Comment 12/15/2020. This is a real opportunity, though obviously one with complications:

What [Iranian president Hassan] Rouhani is signalling to Biden and to Europe is that if they want Iran to go back to observing the stringent stipulations of the JCPOA, they can have that, but they have to turn on the money spigots.

A lot of Washington interests want to squeeze Iran, over issues like its presence in Syria, or its ballistic missile program, or human rights, by tying them to a resumption of the nuclear deal. These are very bad ideas, since denuclearizing the Middle East should come first. Biden is said to agree, and this is the most promising news on the horizon. Iran can be more successfully pressed on those other issues if it depends on income from a Renault car factory and exports to the US, etc. Isolated states find it easier to be rogue states. [my emphasis]

Trump's "America First" legacy is a grim, militaristic one

The most toxic and urgently dangerous legacy that the Trump's very Republican Administration is leaving us is his militarism.

Some people who are (rightly or wrongly) considered part of the left will point to elements of Trump's foreign policy as evidence of an isolationist dovish-ness as a way to warn about the establishment foreign policy assumptions that we can reasonably expect to be extremely influential in the Biden-Harris Administration.

As a polemical device, this is understandable. I'm not promising never to use it myself.

But substantively, I've been critical for, well, as long as I can remember of rightwing isolationism, especially the brand of it associated with the America First tradition. Some people who associated themselves with the pre-Second World War America First movement were acting from a genuinely peace-oriented from pacifist or labor-left motives. An interesting example of a boo expressing such a view us Theodore Dreiser's 1941 book, America Is Worth Saving. Dreiser was attracted to the Communist Party's views, and at that time of the Soviet-German Nonaggression Pact, Soviet diplomacy was calling the British and German war against Germany an imperialist war and took a very anti-British position. A reminder of the complications peace politics can encounter. (A contemporary review in the Communist Party's literary magazine of Dreiser's book gives a flavor of it, Dreiser's J'Accuse)

But rightwing "isolationism" from Charles Lindbergh to Barry Goldwater to Pat Buchanan to Donald Trump has always been based on a hardcore nationalist, militaristic worldview. Woody Guthrie got the gist of it in this song, America First (Woody Guthrie):

"They say America First, but they mean America Next."

Michael Klare, We won’t miss Trump’s two-faced military policy Responsible Statecraft 12/07/2020

Michael Klare gives a good overview of Trump's military orientation in We won’t miss Trump’s two-faced military policy Responsible Statecraft 12/07/2020:

The Pentagon’s annual spending authority climbed every year between 2016 and 2020, rising from $580 billion at the start of his administration to $713 at the end, with much of that increment directed to the procurement of advanced weaponry. Additional billions were incorporated into the Department of Energy budget for the acquisition of new nuclear weapons and the full-scale “modernization” of the country’s nuclear arsenal.

Far more important than that increase in arms spending, however, was the shift in strategy that went with it. The military posture President Trump inherited from the Obama administration was focused on fighting the Global War on Terror (GWOT), a grueling, never-ending struggle to identify, track, and destroy anti-Western zealots in far-flung areas of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The posture he’s bequeathing to Joe Biden is almost entirely focused on defeating China and Russia in future “high-end” conflicts waged directly against those two countries — fighting that would undoubtedly involve high-tech conventional weapons on a staggering scale and could easily trigger nuclear war. [my emphasis]

There was plenty for money for military contractors of various kinds to be made in the GWOT. But a shift to a massive new armament program to confront China and Russia in conventional and nuclear warfare brings far more. Trump had the populist instinct to talk about getting out of endless wars. But his program is based on hardcore militarism.

But this was barely an issue at all in the Presidential election. And even that probably overstates the role it played. Klare writes:

Supporters of the new administration and even members of Biden’s immediate circle (though not his actual appointees to national security posts) have advanced some stirring ideas about transforming American military policy, including reducing the role military force plays in America’s foreign relations and redeploying some military funds to other purposes like fighting Covid-19. Such ideas are to be welcomed, but President Biden’s top priority in the military area should be to focus on the true Trump military legacy — the one that has set us on a war course in relation to China and Russia — and do everything in his power to steer us in a safer, more prudent direction. Otherwise, the phrase “forever war” could gain a new, far grimmer meaning. [my emphasis]

His article originally appeared at TomDispatch 12/06/2020, with an introductory comment by Tom Engelhardt that includes, "As it turns out, America’s forever wars (still ongoing, though perhaps finally winding down) may be succeeded by wars that none of us will ever forget."

Recommendations for a Biden-Harris peace policy

Benjamin Friedman and Stephen Wertheim gives some foreign policy suggestions to the incoming Biden-Harris Administration in Say No, Joe: On U.S. foreign policy, there’s no going back to the status quo. Foreign Policy 11/25/2020.

He also appeared on The Majority Report on 12/02/2020 talking about the same topic, Why Biden Can't Go Back to the Foreign Policy Status-Quo w/ Stephen Wertheim - MR Live - 12/2/20, starting just after 18:00:

In the article, he and Friedman make the broad topical points, here quoted as a bullet-point list:

First, the Biden administration should not pursue global military dominance.

Second, the Biden administration must deliver on its promise to end what are often referred to as the United States’ “forever wars.”

Third, the U.S. military cannot police the Middle East, and Biden should not ask it to try.

Fourth, Biden must resist NATO expansion.

Finally, the next administration must temper U.S. militarism toward China.

0Changing NATO is not easy. The end of the Soviet Union would have been an appropriate time to redefine that alliance and made a more serious effort to establish a more stable relationship with Russia. The expansion of NATO eastward was bound to provoke Russian reactions like those we have seen in Georgia and Ukraine. But that's now the proverbial water under the bridge.

Here is Friedman and Wertheim write on NATO policy:

For all his rebukes of European allies, Trump only increased U.S. security commitments to the continent. On his watch, the United States sent lethal weapons to Ukraine, intensified revolving military deployments in the Baltic States, and welcomed Montenegro and North Macedonia into NATO. That trend needs to stop, not least because the accession of the next candidates in line for NATO—Ukraine and Georgia—could provoke a dangerous response from Russia. The Biden administration should welcome initiatives from France and other European states to assume the primary responsibility for dealing with security challenges in their own region. By doing so, the United States would not only cut down on costs but also diminish the risk of being pulled into a World War III. [my emphasis]

There have been indications recently, including Russia's tilt toward Azerbaijan in this year's military conflict with Armenia, that Putin's government is shifting to a more cautious and defensive foreign policy phase. It would certainly be worth a serious attempt to come to some relationship with Russia in which they allow their ethnic enclaves in Georgia and Ukraine to revert to those countries and returns Crimea to Ukraine. Some more-or-less explicit

Even that would be a very difficult diplomatic project. But it's worth a real effort.

It's also worth repeating the sentence of the last quote: "For all his rebukes of European allies, Trump only increased U.S. security commitments to the [European] continent."

Whatever else Trump's America First policy may have been, a more restrained posture in European affairs it was not. Particularly when it comes to expanding risks of involvement in military conflicts.

A couple of European left critics of Biden during this transition period

Here are a couple of European left perspectives on the immediate political situation in the US, a video and an audio interview from former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, and one from Sahra Wagenknecht, who has been a leading figure in the German Left Party for decades. I doubt that anyone would dispute that they are both figures of "the left".

Both touch on the perennial point of dispute within the US Democratic Party, class vs. social identity. It seems that everyone has their own take on how those divisions actually break down and their own preferred descriptions for them. Felix Schilk in a recent essay refers to the terms "economic cleavage" and "cultural cleavage" to refer to those differences, noting that they are common terms in academic research on populism. ("Die soziale Frage als Ordnungsproblem," Das faschistische Jahrhundert, 2020)

The use of "cleavage" to talk about party affiliations is identified in political science with a concept elaborated in 1967 by Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan. Without folding in the particular structural analysis they made, these could be useful terms in discussed the "intersectionality" issue involved in understanding the current political distinctions among the center-left, the populist left, and the populist right in European and American politics.

Varoufakis gives a statement on the current US poltiical situation on behalf of the small DiEM25, for which in the serves as a Member of Parliament in Greece for the national party affiliate. Yanis Varoufakis on the 2020 US election DiEM25 11/10/2020:

His interview with Wolfgang Münchau of the Eurointelligence podcast can be found here at Varoufakis' blog, In conversation with Eurointelligence’s Wolfgang Munchau on Trumpism, European fiscal discipline & the US-China Cold War – 10th November 2020

Varoufakis thinks that Democratic progressives in the US are generally on the correct path. He suggests that it's key for Democratic progressives to remember, "It was Obama's failures that gve rise to Trump." And that he uses to stress the need for adequate economic and social policies to give a wider circle of voters and emotional stake in progressive Democratic policies.

Sahra Wagenknecht YouTube talk in her weekly Thursday video podcast is here, Böser Trump, guter Biden? Warum wir uns keine Illusionen machen sollten 11/12/2020:

In the notes to the video, she includes this message, which is not a transcript of the video. I've included it below, with my paragraph breaks added, and my translation into English below.

Joe Biden hat die US-Wahl gewonnen. Aber wird jetzt wirklich alles besser? Dafür lohnt ein Blick in die Biographie des neuen Präsidenten: Wer ist Joe Biden? Wofür steht er? Was hat er in der Vergangenheit gemacht?

Die Antworten sind ernüchternd. Um das tief gespaltene Land zu einen, helfen ein paar schöne Reden und symbolische Akte nicht. Das für viele Medien erneut überraschende Ergebnis von Trump ist Ausdruck davon, wie viele Menschen sich vom politischen »Establishement«, für das Biden steht wie kaum ein anderer, nicht vertreten fühlen.

In den deindustrialisierten Regionen der USA herrschen Armut, Kriminalität, Perspektivlosigkeit – und Politiker, von beiden Parteien, schauen seit Jahrzehnten weg. Die mangelhaften sozialen Sicherungssysteme, in denen Menschen nach 5 Jahren Bezug von Sozialleistung für den Rest ihres Lebens nichts (!) mehr bekommen außer Essensmarken, die schlechte medizinische Versorgung für weite Teile der Bevölkerung, lebenslange Schulden für einen Hochschulabschluss, explodierende Mieten und Immobilienpreise, Obdachlosigkeit, die Drogenkrise, Millionen Menschen in Gefängnissen, steigende Suizidraten, sinkende Lebenserwartung – diese und andere Probleme mögen sich unter Trump weiter verschärft haben, doch die Ursachen für die extreme soziale und kulturelle Spaltung des Landes liegen viel tiefer.

Ich hoffe sehr, dass jetzt besser Zeiten anbrechen. Bidens Bilanz aus fast 50 Jahren politischer Tätigkeit lässt anderes befürchten.

[Joe Biden won the US election. But is everything really getting better now? It's worth a look at the new president's biography: Who is Joe Biden? What does it stand for? What has he done in the past?

The answers are sobering. To unite the deeply divided country, a few fine speeches and symbolic acts do not help. The surprising result of Trump for many in the media is an expression of how many people feel unrepresented by the political "establishment" that Biden stands for like no other.

In the de-industrialized regions of the US, poverty, crime, lack of prospects – and politicians, from both parties, have been looking away for decades. The flawed social security systems in which people get nothing (!) for the rest of their lives after 5 years of receiving benefits except food stamps, poor medical care for large parts of the population, lifetime debt for a college degree, skyrocketing rents and property prices, homelessness, the drug crisis, millions of people in prisons, rising suicide rates, falling life expectancy – these and other problems may have worsened under Trump, but the causes of the extreme social and cultural division of the country lie much deeper.

Biden won the US election. But is everything really getting better now? It's worth a look at the new president's biography: Who is Joe Biden? What does it stand for? What did he do in the past?] (my emphasis)

Both Varoufaks and Wagenknecht articulate the idea that working-class voters were attracted to Trump in signficant part because they felt that politicians were not listening to them. This is okay as a throwaway campaign line. But in American politics, "I don't feel listened to" has become a stock complaint, essentially meaningless without more specific context. Especially for voters whose "cultural cleavage" includes a particular disdain for black people and Latinos, for instance, "I don't feel listened to" is a socially safe of saying they support extremely conservative Republicans without copping to more explicit prejudices.

And of course, here's where the "cultural cleavage" overlaps with the "economic cleavage." On the one hand, for many people the cultural cleavage actually is subjectively more important than any feelings of the now-proverbial "economic anxiety" in their voting decisions. Race and gender and nationalist sentiments count. But at the same time, the material conditions produced by extreme economic inequality, declining incomes, and increased economic security have a huge though not entirely predictable effects on how people experience the cultural cleavage. As Varoufakis notes, extreme economic problems have fueled left as well as rightwing movements in the past.

Varoufakis and Wagenknecht both also stress that Trump didn't start any new wars. This is true. Trump didn't go try to occupy any additional countries with US troops. Obviously, you can't say much about four years of US foreign policy in a sentence or two. But as a polemical point to argue against future unnecessary wars under the Biden-Harris Administration, it makes sense. E.g.: Even Donald Trump didn't do anything as drastic as invading Country X!

But it's important to remember that Trump's "America First" foreign policy was never a peace policy, any more than the Republican isolationism of the pre-World War II America First movement or its immediate postwar "isolationist" successors were. It is a narrowly nationalistic, militaristic view of foreign policy.

I am confident that the level of incompetence that has always characterized the Trump-Pence Administration has been a significant reason that his foreign policy hasn't been even worse. Speaking of invasion, the Administration's exceptionally clownish regime-change operation against Venezuela also included an even more fumbling attempt at an invasion of "freedom fighters" than the Pay of Pigs invasion of 1961 against Cuba. And Trump almost blundered into war with Iran early this year with his targeted assassination strike on a senior Iranian general. (Qasem Soleimani: US kills top Iranian general in Baghdad air strike BBC News 01/03/2020)

The Trump-Pence Administration also fueled the war in Yemen, an ongoing horror show. (War in Yemen Council on Foreign Relations Global Conflict Tracker; accessed 11/11/2020).

The last four years have been yet another serious setback for nuclear nonproliferation, with Trump's sad farce of negotiations with North Korea and his pulling out of the nuclear agreement with Iran. Trump was operating on a genuinely primitive view of foreign policy and international trade and self-enrichment for the Trump family business. A constructive peace policy is something very different.

In terms of EU-European relations, Biden won't be as obnoxious as Trump. But Varoufakis discusses how the expectation of a much better relationship with the US the next four years may remove some of the subjective urgency of strengthening the European Union. Britain has left the EU, weakening both Britain and the EU as actors capable of influencing international events. Trump is openly hostile to the EU. But the US policy under Clinton, Bush II and Obama was to favor a broad expansion of the EU but keep the EU as a relative loose organization with limited ability to challenge US foreign policy. The Cheney-Bush national security policy was very explicit about preventing the emergence of any "peer competitor" in global power. They wanted a weaker rather than stronger EU.

But I don't think anyone on the left or center-left should be complacent about a Biden Presidency. He's facing giant public health and economic crises and a very recalcitrant QAnon-ified Republican Party that will bitterly oppose him on every front.

US foreign policy after the election

The quality of US foreign policy will continue to deteriorate and even more rapidly if Donald Trump is reelected - or otherwise remains as President for another term. I much prefer to think about how a Biden Administration might make some pragmatic improvements and repair some of the mess the current administration has made.

Either way, I've been thinking through some of the major themes under which I'm looking at both possibilities.

Nuclear nonproliferation (including nuclear arms reduction) and climate change are the two greatest threats not only to the United States but all of humanity. Those two priorities should frame the whole of US foreign policy.

As the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists noted earlier this year (Closer than ever: It is 100 seconds to midnight 01/23/2020):

Humanity continues to face two simultaneous existential dangers—nuclear war and climate change—that are compounded by a threat multiplier, cyber-enabled information warfare, that undercuts society’s ability to respond. The international security situation is dire, not just because these threats exist, but because world leaders have allowed the international political infrastructure for managing them to erode.

In the nuclear realm, national leaders have ended or undermined several major arms control treaties and negotiations during the last year, creating an environment conducive to a renewed nuclear arms race, to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and to lowered barriers to nuclear war. Political conflicts regarding nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea remain unresolved and are, if anything, worsening. US-Russia cooperation on arms control and disarmament is all but nonexistent. ...

This situation—two major threats to human civilization, amplified by sophisticated, technology-propelled propaganda—would be serious enough if leaders around the world were focused on managing the danger and reducing the risk of catastrophe. Instead, over the last two years, we have seen influential leaders denigrate and discard the most effective methods for addressing complex threats—international agreements with strong verification regimes—in favor of their own narrow interests and domestic political gain. By undermining cooperative, science- and law-based approaches to managing the most urgent threats to humanity, these leaders have helped to create a situation that will, if unaddressed, lead to catastrophe, sooner rather than later. [my emphasis]

NATO is an important alliance not least because it exists, and has a key institution in the world for over six decades. Whatever criticisms we want to make of its history, it was a key institution for a Europe that has not had a major war since 1945. And even if we think significant changes in the alliance may be needed, treating it like a Mob protection racket as the current President has done is clearly not a good way to handle it.

Foreign policy realists like George Kennan and Stephen Walt warned that expanding NATO after 1989 would be problematic because Russia would inevitably regard it as a military threat and act accordingly. The expansion of NATO to include Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, all of which were part of the former Soviet Union, was a particularly risky step. But to quote one of Trump's most infamous statements in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is what it is. A redefined NATO in the context of a larger strategic understanding with Russia would be very desirable. But incredibly difficult. Something way beyond the capability of a team of wreckers and grifters like the current administration.

Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) President Richard Haass comments in Present at the Disruption: How Trump Unmade U.S. Foreign Policy (Foreign Affairs 95:5 Sept-Oct 2020) on "Trump’s reluctance to reaffirm U.S. fidelity to NATO’s Article 5, the treaty’s collective-defense provision." This is a strong sign to the NATO allies that bipartisan commitment to the NATO alliance has been at the least drastically reduced. While American pundits and Democratic consultants making campaign ads may want to pretend that the current President is some kind of bizarre aberration in an otherwise conservative and sensible Republican Party, NATO governments cannot afford to make that assumption. As Haass remarks, "Alliances are predicated on reliability and predictability, and no ally is likely to view the United States as it did before."

The reality that China is the most powerful rising world power and in future decades will have an economy significantly larger than any other country. And that means they will have a greater influence on the terms of world trade and their military clout will increase and that other countries around the world will have to make decisions about how to work with and balance against China's power. That much is not really in question, it's the way the international system works.

But the general political discussion in American politics is painfully superficial, dominated by vague ideas about trade policy and melodramatic rhetoric that sometimes sound like a rehash of primitive slogans out of the 1950s that even then were promoting a poorly-informed policy. So, for instance, we hear a lot about China's threatening moves in the South China Sea. Apparently every TV pundit knows there could be a confrontation of some kind between the US and China in the South China Sea. I doubt that many of them could say much more than that what the US interests there are. Haass notes in his essay that the Trump Administration "has been mostly passive as China has solidified its control of the South China Sea."

Vietnam is one of the countries bordering on the South China Sea. Which should be a reminder to Americans that misunderstandings, exaggerated fears, and blinding ideology on the part of American policymakers have produced bad results in that area in the past. Jacob Stakes in The Chinese Military Threat Is Real (Democracy Journal 08/14/2020) makes his case on how the US should regard the changing military power configuration in which China is now operating:

Beijing defines its sovereign territory expansively to include Taiwan, disputed islands and rocks in the East and South China seas along with the waters themselves, and land on the border with India. Therefore, even “defensive” goals seek to redraw the map, using force if necessary, with major implications for the United States and its alliance commitments, especially with Japan and the Philippines.

US Latin American policy has been chronically bad for most of the existence of the United States. In more recent times, both the Cheney-Bush and Obama Administrations followed policies that favored "business-friendly conservatives" like Maricio Macri of Argentina or (now) Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil over elected center-left governments from the Texas border to Tierra del Fuego. And it's been even worse under Trump, as the malicious but clownishly inept regime-change operation against Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela dramatically illustrates. To put in in terms not usually encountered in Foreign Affairs, US Latin American policy should not give top priority to the narrow interests of financial buccaneers and extractive industries. A policy build on genuinely supporting democratic processes along with constructive trade relations and, where necessary, military cooperation would make a lot more sense for the country, however inconvenient it might be for some business lobbies.

American democracy, so long as we can keep it, is an important element of "soft power" that is not only of theoretical interest but also enhances American influence in very practical ways. But not every policy that the US justifies as democracy promotion is benign, much less those known as humanitarian intervention. See: the great concern professional neocon warmongers expressed for women's rights in places like Afghanistan and Iraq during the Cheney-Bush Administration.

But Ben Rhodes, a Deputy National Security Adviser for eight years during the Obama Administration, argues (The Democratic Renewal: What It Will Take to Fix U.S. Foreign Policy Foreign Affairs 95:5 Sept-Oct 2020):

A Biden victory in November would offer the temptation of seeking to restore the United States’ post–Cold War image of itself as a virtuous hegemon. But that would badly underestimate the country’s current predicament. The United States hasn’t just lost ground; the ship of state is pointed in the wrong direction, and the rest of the world has moved on. Global concerns about U.S. credibility aren’t simply tied to the calamitous presidency of Donald Trump—they’re rooted in the fact that the American people elected someone like Trump in the first place. Having seen Americans do that once, foreign leaders and publics will wonder whether the United States might do it again, particularly given the fealty of the Republican Party to Trump’s nationalist, authoritarian brand of politics.

He hopefully suggests that a Biden Administration might find ways to renew the soft-power assets of the US:

The extraordinary mobilization against structural racism and injustice offers an opportunity to renew the United States’ sense of purpose. A large part of the country’s claim to global leadership has been the evolutionary and redemptive elements of its story—the fact that the United States is a multiethnic, multicultural society that has, through constitutional democracy, chipped away at institutional racism and the lingering power of white supremacy.

War really should be the last resort in foreign policy. That's a classic part of historical Just War Theory. Every war presents complications of its own. Preventive war is already illegal in international law and for good reasons. It should not be the case for the United States to use "humanitarian intervention" as a fig leaf for reckless military interventions, like with Libya in 2011.

We need a fully functioning and professional State Department. See: Doyle McManus, Almost Half the Top Jobs in Trump’s State Department Are Still Empty The Atlantic 11/04/2018; Courtney Bublé, Watchdog Finds Serious Staffing and Leadership Problems at State Department Government Executive 01/23/2020; Diplomacy in Crisis: The Trump Administration's Decimation of the State Department (Democratic Staff Report for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) 07/28/2020.

Zombie ideas and attitudes can lurch around for a long time. Cold War triumphalism is one that the US should relegate to the past. And in many ways, that attitude has been swallowed by the events of the last 30 years. But the Republicans' current celebration of "American Exceptionalism" incorporates a version of Cold War triumphalism. But it was always a perilously superficial view of the period in which the Warsaw Pact ended, the Soviet Union dissolved, and the "state socialist" systems in them were replaced. David Singer wrote in 2000 (Triumphalism and Reality in U.S. Cold War Policies Peace Review 12:4):

[W]ith the end of the Cold War, the U.S. was awash in triumphal shouts of victory and success. But in the 10 or so years since, we have not only seen all of those dreadful chickens come home to roost, but we have also demonstrated that we still see them as indicators of national greatness. Actually, they are really signs of declining influence, global chaos, and the continuing erosion and destruction of those norms and institutions so essential to building a civilized human community. [my emphasis]

What were Russian goals in trying to provide assistance to Trump's campaign in 2016?

Paul Pillar provides a sober look at Russian goals in their support of Trump's election in 2016 and their continued promotion of his political career in Foreign Interference in U.S. Elections is Even Worse Than You Thought Responsible Statecraft 01/27/2020:

When the interests of the foreign government diverge from those of the United States enough to favor weakening of the United States, the harmful effects of interference multiply. This is the framework for understanding the Russian interference in the 2016 election. It remains unclear how much the original Russian motivation was to discredit American democracy and how much to help elect Trump. Both goals were probably involved, with the emphasis shifting the more Trump’s victory started to look feasible. But viewed from today’s perspective, the two objectives go hand-in-hand.

The incumbent U.S. president is today one of the biggest sources of discrediting American democracy, with his levying of fraudulent charges of voter fraud even after winning an election. On foreign policy matters that would be of most interest to Russia, the Trump presidency has entailed huge disruption to U.S. alliances, to the point of the U.S. president becoming a laughing stock. The last three years have seen a precipitous decline in foreign populations’ trust in the United States. For these and other reasons, Vladimir Putin can conclude that the meddling in the 2016 election was a good investment that has paid him ample dividends. [my emphasis]

A lot of politicians and commentators still seem to be trying to shoehorn Vladimir Putin's Russia into the role vacated by the fall of the Soviet Union in the minds of American policymakers, however dubious some of those views of the USSR were back in the day.

Democratic memes portraying Trump as a Putin puppet are misleading. As Pillar writes, destabilizing the American government to some degree and disrupting American alliances were realistic if ambitious goals to which the Russian government could contribute with their mischief in the 2016 election. It's extremely like that they assumed, like most American pollsters and commentators, that Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 election. They almost surely were aiming at creating distractions for her as President.

Instead, they (and we!) got chaos agent Donald Trump in the White House. It was more than they could have reasonably expected. And Putin's government can't be entirely happy to have such a loose cannon to deal with in the White House.

Pillar also urges more diligence for various kinds of influence, licit and otherwise, that countries like the Arab Emirates, Israel, and Saudi Arabia exert on US foreign policy. He also mentions in passing the issue of foreign government funding foreign policy think tanks. The latter isn't inherently bad. But it means that the terms on which funding is accepted and the source of the funds do need to be considered in evaluating the perspective of think tanks.

Three "ages" for Trump's foreign policy?

Thomas Wright of the Brookings Institute offers a periodization of Trump's foreign policy. (Trump Couldn’t Ignore the Contradictions of His Foreign Policy Any Longer The Atlantic 07/05/2019.

He sees an earlier period in which Trump staffed major foreign policy with more establishment Republicans like Rex Tillerson. Wright calls this group the "axis of adults" which provided a Trump "age of constraint." Trump grew frustrated with them for not being belligerent and nationalist enough. What followed was an "age of action," characterized by the ascendency of John Bolton, who replaced H.R. McMasters as National Security Adviser in April 2018.

He sees Trump as now in a new period, an " age of reckoning." The turning point he finds last month in the military attack on Iran that Trump called off at the last moment. Wright takes the advice of FOX News personality Tucker Carlson, a hardline rightwinger currently in an anti-interventionist mode, for calling off the strike.

Wright interprets this with a touch of Hegelianism, reading it as Trump wrestling with the "consequences and contradictions" of his two major views he likes to promote of himself, "as a dealmaker, and as a militarist."

One way or another, Trump seems determined to present an image of himself in 2020 as a dealmaker who is getting tough with allies who have taken advantage of the United States and making peace with the country’s enemies. The risks are enormous. Trump may strike bad deals. He could permanently weaken America’s influence and encourage aggression against allies. But it may work for him politically, throwing the Democrats off balance and setting the stage for a second term in which he will be empowered to follow his instincts to their logical conclusion. The bullets Trump never fired in his first term— such as withdrawal from NATO and the World Trade Organization—may be put back in the chamber. The 75-year-old American-led international order will be back in his firing line. Men like [Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo may tell themselves they can steer him in a different direction.

"But if they finally stand up to him," Wright concludes, he will likely dump them, as well.

It's important to look for patterns in Trump's behavior. It's also tempting to look to psychological quirks affecting the decisionmaking of someone holding the power of the US Presidency.

But we also have to keep in mind that Trump has a well-established record of incompetence, lack of basic knowledge (Washington seizing the airports during the Revolutionary War!), and a spastic, unpredictable style of management whose purpose is in part to keep his staff off guard and forced to cater to his whims. And he evidences no obvious empathy for the potential victims of his decisions: not for Americans soldiers, not for Iranian or Venezuelan civilians, and certainly not for kidnapped Latino children in his border concentration camps.

And what we are also seeing is drift. A large an well-established organization like the federal Cabinet Departments can continue functioning for a while on old patterns and procedures even with incompetent management. But the quality of management matters. With departments managed by greedy plutocrats, ideologues, and grifters, all operating in a lawless atmosphere, things will go wrong. And get worse over time.

The June near-strike on Iran is a reminder how quickly and badly that things can go off the rails with a leader like Trump. And, at this point, the Democratic Congressional leadership under both Nancy Pelosi in the House and Chuck Schumer in the Senate clearly have no intention to use what Congressional power they have - and the power the Democratic majority in the House has is substantial - to constrain Trump's actions, even the most illegal ones. There is clearly major concern among Democrats and some Republcians Members of Congress about US involvement in Yemen and Iran. But blocking Trump from starting or expanding a war with impeachment fully off the table will not be possible.

And it's always worth keeping in mind John Kenneth Galbraith's observation on the beginning of the First World War (Age of Uncertainty 1977):

There was a final consideration, one that it is always thought a trifle pretentious to stress. Rulers in Germany and Eastern Europe, generals in all countries, held their jobs by right of family and tradition. If inheritance qualifies one for office, intelligence cannot be a requirement. Nor is its absence likely to be a disqualification. On the contrary, intelligence is a threat to those who do not possess it, and there is a strong case, therefore, for excluding those who do possess it. This was the tendency in 1914. In consequence, both the rulers and the generals in World War I were singularly brainless men.

None was capable of thought on what war would mean for his class - for the social order that was so greatly in his favor. There bad always been wars. Rulers had been obliterated. The ruling classes had always survived. To the extent that there was thought on the social consequences of war, this was what was believed.

The aftermath of the First World War was especially catastrophic, of course,for the ruling groups of 1914.

Tracking patterns in Trump's Administration is important. But it shouldn't distract us from the fact that we have to expect a continuing decline in competence during Trump's Presidency. And that not only means greater risks of war. It means that as long as Trump is President, progress on nuclear proliferation and climate change will have to proceed with any significant help from the United States.

The Syria troop-withdrawal muddle and why it shows it's a mistake to consider the Trump-Pence foreign policy non-interventionist

It's not as though the Democratic Party, or the left and center-left more generally, have had a general consensus on foreign policy controversies any time in the recent past. Broadlly speaking, there is probably general agreement on large questions like the need for nuclear arms control or support for NATO. The most dramatic case of major disagreement came in 2002, when Democratic Senators like Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry all voted to support the Cheney-Bush Administrations's invastion of Iraq. Given the scope of the disaster that resulted from that, their position looks even more irresponsible in retrospect than it did at the time. And it did look irresponsible at the time and was heavily and widely criticized by Democrats.

Glenn Greenwald is generally known as a progressive critic of US politics and parties. But he also has a "libertarian" streak which shows itself in some civil-liberties positions that may sometimes put him on the side of conservatives. And also in foreign policy positions that can look like some uneasy combination of antiwar left restraint and Old Right isolationism. He has been particularly skeptical of the "Russiagate" claims of Russian influence in the US elections.

In his article As Democratic Elites Reunite With Neocons, the Party’s Voters Are Becoming Far More Militaristic and Pro-War Than Republicans The Intercept 01/11/2019, he takes the opportunity to tweak Democrats for indulging hawkish temptations around Trump's foreign policy.

I would say that in this piece, he overstates the significance of poll results showing that Democratic voters seem to be more hawkish at the moment than Republicans. The fact that Democrats currently show in polling as more concerned about pulling troops out of Syria than Republicans reflects the news the last couple of weeks in which Trump's surprise announcement that he was pulling US forces out and the subsequent confusion about what he's actually doing have been in the news. US media coverage of foreign policy, including Middle East issues, is often sadly deficient. In a moment like this, where there is a sudden flurry of reporting about a particular decision relating to a complex situation that previously has not been at the center of political controversies in the media, many people will initially take their lead from their own political party's leading figures. Trump cultists are especially inclined to back the Orange Leader on anything without being especially concerned about consistency. And in this case, even left-leaning noninterventionists who favor pulling US troops out of Syria have expressed concern over the spastic way the Trump-Pence Administration has been going about it. (And, in an unusual twist, some American anarchists - and there aren't many American anarchists! - are in favor of leaving US troops there to support the Syrian Kurds.)

I'm sympathetic to Greenwald's more general criticism of Democrats' embrace some very dubious neoconservataive warmongers as part of the anti-Trum "Resistance." Even though he overhypes the point, including in the first sentence quoted here (internal links not included here):

A core ethos of the anti-Trump #Resistance has become militarism, jingoism, and neoconservatism. Trump is frequently attacked by Democrats using longstanding Cold War scripts wielded for decades against them by the far right: Trump is insufficiently belligerent with U.S. enemies; he’s willing to allow the Bad Countries to take over by bringing home U.S. soldiers; his efforts to establish less hostile relations with adversary countries is indicative of weakness or even treason.

At the same time, Democratic policy elites in Washington are once again formally aligning with neoconservatives, even to the point of creating joint foreign policy advocacy groups (a reunion that predated Trump). The leading Democratic Party think tank, the Center for American Progress, donated $200,000 to the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute and has multilevel alliances with warmongering institutions. By far the most influential liberal media outlet, MSNBC, is stuffed full of former Bush-Cheney officials, security state operatives, and agents, while even the liberal stars are notably hawkish (a decade ago, long before she went as far down the pro-war and Cold Warrior rabbit hole that she now occupies, Rachel Maddow heralded herself as a “national security liberal” who was “all about counterterrorism”). [my emphasis]

Paul Pillar (Syria Policy: The Hawks’ Talons Sink Deeper into Trump The National Interest 1/08/2019) warns everyone not to mistake Trump-Pence for a peace-oriented Administration:

The episode involving withdrawal and non-withdrawal of U.S. troops in Syria should be a lesson for those who mistakenly placed hopes in Trump for a more restrained and less militaristic U.S. foreign policy. Applause lines on the campaign trail have been mistaken for deeper thought. Behind the candidate’s rhetoric there never was enough strategic sense, necessary knowledge, or even caring about foreign affairs to ward off the maneuvers of a determined hawk like [National Security Adviser] Bolton once he was in position to do damage.

James Gelvin reminds us that the noninterventionist criticism around US policy in the Greater Middle East was also directed at the Obama Administration. (No, Trump is not like Obama on Middle East policy Informed Comment 01/08/2019) But he focuses on the important differences in the two Administrations on Syria. "While both presidents have advocated decreasing America’s footprint in the region, I believe their policies are comparable only on the most superficial level. Understanding why enables us to see the fundamental flaw underlying the current policy." And he describes the Big Picture version this way, "Unlike Obama, Trump does not have a Middle East strategy, grand or otherwise. He has impulses."

I also want to mention here Jeanne Morefield's critical look at the broad assumptions of US international relations scholars and practictioners, Trump’s Foreign Policy Isn’t the Problem Boston Review 01/08/2019. For one thing, she brings up the aspect of the "realist" outlook that gives me such a conflicted attitude toward it, its amoral ring that can easily be adapted to justify morally repulsive foreign policy decisions. And she particulary calls attention to the racial assumptions in US policy, a factor that is an imporatant perspective as we look at the aftermath of the First World War, of which I hope we see lots of discussions around the 100th anniversary of the Versailles Treaty this year:

... the norm against noticing prevents foreign policy analysis from even acknowledging -  let alone grappling with - the relationship between race and imperialism that has characterized U.S. international relations from the country’s earliest days. This regime of politely un-seeing - of deflecting - connections between U.S. foreign policy, race hierarchy, and colonial administration was clearly not in effect when Foreign Affairs was released under its original name: the Journal of Race Development. This began to change, however, in the 1920s. Among other contributing factors, World War I, the rise of anti-colonial revolutions, and the emergence of liberal internationalism as a popular ideology helped convince foreign policy experts in the United States and Europe to adopt a policy language oriented toward “development” rather than imperialism or racial difference. ... For liberals, this involves a studied erasure of the imperial origins of twentieth-century internationalism in the League of Nations’ Mandate system and the complicity of Woodrow Wilson in preserving, as Adom Getachew puts it, “white supremacy on a global scale.” [my emphasis]

Morefield includes some criticisms of one of my favorite sources on foreign policy issues, Über-Realist Stephen Walt.

Legitimate questions about sources (3 of 3): Russia, Russia, Russia

Nate Sliver writes of the Russian effect on the outcome of the US Presidential election in 2016:

For instance, this story makes a big deal about a (post-election) Russian social media disinformation campaign on Bob Mueller based on... 5,000 tweets? That's **nothing**. Platform-wide, there are something like 500,000,000 tweets posted each day.https://t.co/LI8wt6tua8 pic.twitter.com/I2XOIf0rdy

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) December 18, 2018

In the three critical states for the Democrats that narrowly went to Trump in 2016, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, "Trump won those states by 0.2, 0.7 and 0.8 percentage points, respectively — and by 10,704, 46,765 and 22,177 votes. Those three wins gave him 46 electoral votes; if Clinton had done one point better in each state, she'd have won the electoral vote, too." (Philip Bump, Donald Trump will be president thanks to 80,000 people in three states Washington Post 12/01/2016)

Bump goes on to say, "The 540-vote margin in Florida that swung the 2000 election is still the modern record-holder for close races, but this is a pretty remarkable result. (Especially since the final gap between Al Gore and George W. Bush was only a little over 500,000 votes nationally.)"

I would say that is a bit of a sloppy way to talk about the 2000 election. Because he didn't mention that in the detailed press consortium recount of the Florida votes, Gore actually won the Florida vote and the state's Electoral College votes should have gone to him. The Supreme Court gave that election to Bush Junior in a crassly partisan decision. But the results of the consortium research were announced during the orgy of patriotic fury in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. So the press generally reported those results in a sloppy way in 2001: Miranda Spencer, Who Won the Election? Who Cares? FAIR 01/01/2002.

This post is not so much about sources as such as about the frameworks we apply to thinking about US and European relations to Russia.

Russia and the 2016 US Election

Russian interference in the 2016 election outraged a lot of Americans, mostly Democrats it seems, and very justifiably so. It's the duty of the government at all levels to protect the integrity of elections.

But the actual effect of the Russian intervention via social media and their own media outlets like RT is impossible to determine for certain. Because national election results, and most below the national level, too, are overdetermined. Many factors effect them. To take a counterfactual example, if there were a state that was considered competitive in a Presidential election and no Demoratic or Republican advertising or campaign events took place in it, while Russian bots generated huge publicity for the Republican in the race, then it would be more credible to conclude that Russian interference decisively affected the outcome of the race.

This is why campaign laws are so important and spending limits are badly needed. There's a general recognition that how well a campaign is financed does affect outcomes, although spending more money it itself doesn't automatically guarantee a win. The Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling even cleared the way for donors to be able to spend essentially sums on election campaigns, in some cases without even reporting publicly who donated the money. It is mainly destructive because it gives our own oligarchs excessive power to control elections and politicians. But it also opens vulnerabilites for illicit foreign interference.

In the end, the kinds of measures that protect the integrity of elections in the United States from regular election-stealing mischief are also the kinds of things that would protect against illicit foreign interference. Secure voting machines not connected to the Internet with paper audit trails checked by systematic audits. Limits on campaign donations and effective reporting measures. Automatic voter registration and federally-enforced limits on how states purge voter lists. And social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter should be required to screen against anoymous accounts that could be fronts for illicit campaign activities, foreign or domestic.

The discussion on the significance of the 2016 Russian election interference was heavily influenced by the Clinton campaign's decision to try to blame the election outcome on it. So for many people, it became the party line that Trump's Electoral College win was mainly due to Russian meddling. And it conveniently deflected criticism from the Demoratic candidate and how both her campaign and the Democratic Party establishment.

It also had the very dubious effect of exaggerating the power of Russia and of Putin's government to influence events.

Timothy Snyder in The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (2018) sometimes sounds like he's arguing that the Russian intervention in the 2016 American election was a stunning feat of international cyber-aggression.

But in the "America" section, he also makes clear that it is actual weaknesses in American democracy that gives Russia or other powers an opening for illicit influence. The current way the Electoral College functions is very heavily undemocratic. That fact needs to be faced realistically. To put in the active voice, the Democratic Party must face it and take action to correct that and other problems. The Republican Party has just as much responsibility to do so. But their basic integrity and commitment to democracy are very much in doubt. And for all too many of them, it's clear that they reject democracy and the rule of law. The Democratic Party since the stalling of the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1980s has avoided any serious consideration of needed Constitutional reforms as though they would be comparable to unleashing an anthrax outbreak. They have to change their mindset.

Russia as a world power

Russia and the United States have most of the nuclear weapons in the world. Russia also spends something like 10% of its GDP on military expenditures. (Though GDP numbers are not an exact measure of economic activity.) Russia's economy is usually taken to be somewhat the size of Italy's. In any case, it's not anywhere near the economic power of the former Soviet Union. And the EU's economy is far larger than Russia's. Germany and France together have a bigger military than Russia. Even excluding US contributions, NATO's military budgets are far greater than Russia's. Although that doesn't mean that they are directly comparable, because that compares a number of country to a single one, Russia.

Russia's nukes are a clear threat to the US and Europe. And Russia and the US have a vital interest in reducing and better regulating their nuclear stockpiles and in strenthening nuclear nonproliferation. We often talk these days about climate change being the biggest threat to humanity. But the single most devestating anthropogenic event affecting climate would be an all-out nuclear war betwee the US and Russia. And sudden, catastropic climate change would be only one of the devastating results.

But as the "nuclear Jesuits", the theoreticians of nuclear war, realized even in the 1950s, the actual use of nuclear weapons as a supplement to conventional war is limited in many ways. The American public regarded the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as something like a magic power to win in wars. Some fools would still like to think of it that way. But, to take an example, if Russia decided to follow up on Putinist rhetoric on how Ukraine is part of eternal Russia and take it over, dropping a nuclear bomb or two on it would be anything but a magical solution. Assuming they would nuke targets of military significance, it would not only kill a lot of people instantly and destroy infrastructure that the Russians would want to preserve. It would also spread radioactive particles all around Ukraine and into neighboring countries, including Russia and the Russian-occupied Crimea.

Another major factor in Russia's geopolitical situation is the stable relationship that Russia currently has with China. A glance at a map of Russia will illustrate why this is significant. Russia has a long border with China. And the current stable relationship between Russia and China are distinctly different from most of the Cold War, when the "Sino-Soviet conflict" was a persistent factor, only belatedly fully recognized by the government and foreign policy establishment in the US. There was even a Sino-Soviet War in 1929, before the Communists took power in China.

Speaking of China, by some measures it is already the world's largest economy. Pretty soon it will be described as such without qualifiers. Former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer in his book Der Abstieg des Westens: Europa in der neuen Weltordnung des 21.Jahrhunderts (2018) describes the implications of China's rise to being the leading world power from a realist foreign policy perspective. In his view, the US will have to deal with the practical implications of becoming the second-leading power. The European Union and Russia will be among the secondary level of world powers along with the US. Fischer argues from the standard realist viewpoint that the US should manage the transition carefully in cooperation with the EU and Russia. And cooperation between the latter two will be important in protecting EU and Russian interests, all while hopefully avoiding military clashes.

In other words, the US, the EU, and Russia cannot afford to treat each other exclusively as adversaries, much less enemies. And this aspect is something easy to lose sight of in the various polemics around Russian election interference. That doesn't mean that the US and EU should refrain from hard-headed negotiating, particularly not on a unilateral or asymmetrical basis. Just the opposite. Achieving the needed level of stable relationships will require clear-headed and expert negotiations on all sides. It should go without saying that the Orange Clown and his like are incapable of such a thing.

Russia and the European Union

One factor very much at work currently is that the Putin government is more set on breaking up the EU than developing more solid cooperation with it. Brexit serves that purpose. Which of course is not the same as the question of how much Russian influence may have affected the outcome of the Brexit referendum.

Russia isn't alone. Trump's America First policy also is hostile to the European Union. While Trump's position is more drastic than those of his predecessors, the Cheney-Bush Administration also sought to divide EU members against each others, especially over the Iraq War. And had notable success in doing so. The Clinton Administration was favorable to the EU. But they wanted a broad but relatively weak EU. Which led them to push for faster expansion than a more sober assessment of how well countries like Hungary and Romania met the basic democratic and rule-of-law critieria of the EU might have produced. The Obama Administration also took a similar position of preferring a united but weak EU. But Putin and Trump share a downright hostility to the EU.

Russia's political meddling in the EU is a more serious threat to European and American interests than anything the Russians are doing to meddle in American politics. That will look like an absurd statement to anyone convinced that Machiavellian Master Vladimir Putin decided the outcome of the 2016 American Presidential election. But not only is that a questionable call, as explained above. It seems far more likely that the Russian goal was to cause enough trouble for Hillary Clinton to politically weaken her Presidency. It's conceivable that they may not even regard the actual election result as a more favorable outcome.

But if nationalistic parties succeed in fragmenting the European Union, that will put Russia in a more powerful position in shaping world politics in the era of Chinese pre-eminence relative to the US and the EU. And Putin currently exerts actual leadership on far-right parties of the Nationalist International, though that designation is still an ironic grouping more than a formal alliance. But alliances among them do exist. The Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), currently the junior coalition partner in Chancellor Sebastian "Babyface" Kurz' government, concluded a formal friendship and cooperation agreement with Putin's Russia United Party in 2016. So far, they haven't been caught taking illicit funds from Russia. Marine Le Pen's far-right party in France, currently called the National Rally (RN, Rassemblement national), on the other hand, has taken dubious Russian financing (Gabriel Gatehouse, Marine Le Pen: Who's funding France's far right? BBC News 04/03/2017):

But there is more to the relationship between Mr Putin and Ms Le Pen than ideological convergence. Because of the National Front's racist and anti-Semitic past, French banks have declined to lend the party money.

So Marine Le Pen has been forced to look elsewhere for financing.

In 2014, the National Front took Russian loans worth €11m (£9.4m). One of the loans, for €9m, came from a small bank, First Czech Russian Bank, with links to the Kremlin.

The general nationalist, Islamophobic, Christianist stance that Putin has taken in his current Presidency is attractive to the far-right parties in Europe, though some of them like the FPÖ have a more secular cast. There's no question that Putin's authoritarian practice and nationalist ideology have real political attraction for political groups in Europe, and not exclusively for those who would be considered part of the Nationalist International group. (E.g., Babyface Kurz' "turquoise" faction of the Christian Democratic People's Party in Austria.)

Here's where an interesting question arises than I can only touch on here. To what extent is the current relationship of the Russian government and ruling party like the relationship that existed between the Soviet Union and other Communist parties in the world? I don't doubt that Russian officials are drawing on their country's previous experience. I'll mention two relevant factors here. One is that the Communist political program was internationalist, however much the USSR, China, Yugoslavia, and other Communist countries may have applied their official ideology for nationalist purposes. The explicit nationalist and racist ideologies attractive to the Straches and Salvinis of Europe are much more difficult to package as internationalist. As one example, the Austrian FPÖ's plans to give dual citizenship to native-born Italians in the South Tyrol area of northern Italy, endorsed by Babyface's current Austrian government, are adamantly opposed by Italy's Salvini-dominated, more-or-less neofascist Italian government.

The second consideration is that, for all the differences, the basic problems involved in parties taking inspiration from foreign models is similar today to what the case for the USSR and affiliated Communist Parties was. There's nothing inherently wrong in a party looking to foreign examples for good ideas. In fact, its a completely commonplace thing. Lord knows the United States has never been shy about holding itself up as a model to the entire world.

On the other hand, there are national secrets to be guarded and national interests to be defended. Voters need to be confident that their leaders are committed to those things. The US Constitution specifies that the President must be a native-born American citizen. While it sounds dated today - it is really unnecessary today - it was designed to prevent a member of a European dynasty being installed as the American President. If a party owes some kind of allegiance to the ruling party of a foreign power, how can they be trusted to lead a national government?

Making such distinctions is not as hard as it may sound in the abstract. The US and EU countries have laws regulating what kinds of interactions with foreign governments are permitted and which not. And for the stealing of national secrets, people professing admiration for a foreign government that wants to steal the secrets aren't the most obvious candidates for that task. On the other hand, it's not in the least unusual for Democrats and Republicans in the United States to point to foreign examples and experiences to support their own proposals and priorities. The current court judgments against Trump allies like his former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn are a reminder that laws defining what makes someone a foreign agent are fairly specific and capable of being enforced. (It's not illegal for an American citizen to act as a foreign agent for another government as long as the purpose is legal and the relationship is reported according to law.)

Evaluating Foreign Threats

Underestimating foreign threats has sometimes been a problem for the United States in the post-World War II era. The most obvious example being the Cheney-Bush Administration's reckless and irresponsible neglect of the very well known terrorist threat from Osama Bin Laden's al-Qaeda group in the first months of their rule.

But overestimating threats, aka, threat inflation, has caused far more problems for the US in that period. Jeffrey Record provides an excellent discussion of this problem in his The Specter of Munich: Reconsidering the Lessons of Appeasing Hitler (2007). Most of the material is included in the paper, Appeasement Reconsidered: Investigating the Mythology of the 1930s (Strategic Studies Institute; Aug 2005). Inflating threats led to some of the worst disasters of post-WWII US foreign policy, the most spectacular being the Vietnam War and the Iraq War. The sorry hisory of "Team B" is a major cautionary tale. (See: Khurram Husain, Neocons: The men behind the curtain Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Nov-Dec 2003)

The American government, political parties, and voters need to keep those lessons in mind as we're moving into the era of China as the world's leading power. Take real threats seriously, including Russian interference in American elections. But don't lose our minds about it. And remember that there are very real factions, some business lobbies and some political ideologues, who have no compunction about wildly exaggerating international dangers for cynical purposes that are not at all identiical to American interests or the cause of peace.

Concluding Thoughts

Yes, Virginia, countries try to influence political outcomes in other countries. And all countries have to deal with it. It's nothing new. In fact, the phenomenon considerably preceded the establishment of nation-states as we know them today.

Noting the Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential election, Mark Weisbrot writes (“Fort Trump” in Poland Is Another Dangerous, Delusional Idea CEPR 12/20/2018):

Americans are understandably upset about any foreign interference in our elections. As are Hondurans, Chileans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, Italians, Iranians, or citizens of scores of other countries where the United States has intervened much more heavily ― sometimes with military coups to reverse results ― in elections. This includes Russia itself, where Americans organized and spent heavily to reelect their ally, Boris Yeltsin, in 1996.

Legitimate and illegitimate means of exercising such influence are defined in national and international law. And, yes, the US, Russia, and other countries will continue to break those rules in the pursuit of their national interests. That doesn't make it right. It doesn't make it effective or constructive, a fact the US really needs to keep more in mind in our own interventions. But it's a fact of international relations, and getting crazy about it isn't really helpful to any country's legitimate national interest.

And, yes, Trump should be impeached and removed from office. And he and his associates should be investigated and prosecuted for violations of the law, including those involving some kind of illegal collution with the Russian government.

[12/28/2018: The spelling of the name of Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini has been corrected.]