Tag Archive for: Donald Trump

ASPI suggests

It was a good week for women in Japan, with the country’s first female Defence Minister (2007), Yuriko Koike, breaking through another glass ceiling to become the first female governor of Tokyo—despite sharp opposition from her party, the Liberal Democratic Party, which elected to endorse one of her male colleagues. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced his new cabinet a few days back, which included the elevation of Tomomi Inada to the defence portfolio, making her the second woman to hold the post. Inada is an up-and-comer in the LDP, known for her nationalist views and as a close confidant and protégé of the prime minister. The Wall Street Journal carries an easy profile. She’ll be one to watch when Abe’s time comes to an end.

Here are some prime cuts on Trump and the presidential circus. Stephen Colbert and John Oliver both took Trump on after his attack on the Khan family (here and here). David Remnick dives into Trump’s ‘humid political embrace’ with Putin, while Jonathan Chait gave us more detail on on the Don-Vlad bromance. Two must-read postmortems on the DNC and RNC come courtesy of Laurie Penny in Medium and Jill Lepore in The New Yorker. And with the conventions out of the way, some are looking to the intelligence briefings that the candidates can now avail themselves of. A column at Foreign Policy takes a look at the history of the mechanism and recommends that Obama cancel Trump’s briefing; and one in the Times imagines just how that briefing might unfold. If you feel like you’re not getting enough Trump in your life (afterall, 2016 is about feelings not facts), The Atlantic’s James Fallows has a continued to fill up a Trump time capsule for the horror of future generations. And finally, The Simpsons have played their hand (above).

Two interesting longer reads on human nature and war this week. The first, from TIME, takes an in-depth look at rape in war, ‘a weapon even more powerful than a bomb or a bullet’. It draws on the first-hand accounts of women living in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and asks how their experiences might be used to counter Daesh’s sexual enslavement of Yezidi women. The second, from The New Yorker, examines the evolution of war photography, arguing that:

‘Harrowing photographs do not inevitably lose their power to shock. But they don’t help us much to understand. Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.

The Economist has published an excellent short piece on the latest arms race—between surface vessels and submarines (with the balance tipping in favour of the latter) as navies around the world rush to develop better methods to track enemy boats.

This week has seen loads of fresh research offerings from plenty of different areas, kicking off with the massive State of the Climate report from the American Meteorological Society. Based on the work of 450 scientists from 62 different countries, the report confirms that, yes, the climate is going to hell and taking us with it, with 2015 coming in as the hottest year on record. This primer from The Guardian displays some of the report’s key findings in a series of infographics. From CSIS, a great report on the US–Egypt relationship dives into the shared interests of the two countries and the impact of a closer partnership in today’s Middle East. The bi-monthly ASEAN Focus (PDF) is also out, with a special issue focusing on the South China Sea ruling. And if you want to contribute your thoughts to an important US research effort, check out this quick survey from CNAS on the use of drones.

Finally, someone has written a spec script for a Seinfeld episode set in the days following 9/11. It’s in incredibly poor taste but the gags are pitch perfect. So bad, but so good.

Podcast

In this week’s episode (44 mins) of the Foreign Policy E.R. podcast series, David Rothkopf, Rosa Brooks, Molly O’Toole and David Sanger dissect the relationship between Donald Trump and Russia—and ask the question on everyone’s mind: should US officials be trusting ‘America’s burst appendix’ with national security secrets in the lead up to November?

Videos

Back in June we foreshadowed Blackout, an online series being pulled together by VICE and Jigsaw to highlight free expression around the world. The series has shone a spotlight on the situations in Pakistan (16 mins), Venezuela (20 mins), Belarus (17 mins), and Eritrea (17 mins). The final installment, on cyber laws and wars in Thailand, was uploaded this week (14 mins).  

GQ Australia’s Adam Baidawi visited North Korea for the Pyongyang Marathon earlier this year, and released some A+ footage of the hermit kingdom’s capital city along with a first-hand interview (7 mins) on visiting the world’s most isolated country. The short video touches on the ethics of holidaying in an oppressive regime and the use of propaganda during the Marathon period, which is incidentally the DPRK’s peak tourism season, with about 1,000 foreigners participating in the race.

Events

Canberra: The ANU’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre will next week host Yukiya Amano, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who will deliver the 2016 John Gee Memorial Lecture and sit down for a chat with Gareth Evans on the topic of Atoms for Peace and Development. Register here.

Melbourne: The Asia Institute, the Melbourne School of Government and the Centre for Asian Business and Economics are co-hosting an exciting panel event on the future of Indonesia’s economic prospects, featuring Indonesia’s Minister for National Development Planning and Head of the National Development Planning Agency, Bambang Brodjonegoro. Mark your diaries for 15 August.

ASPI suggests

It was the week that US politics junkies had hung out for—the one where the Republican National Convention circus rolled up to Cleveland for the coronation of Donald J. Trump. While The Donald was finally elevated as the GOP’s Presidential nominee, things otherwise didn’t go to script—Ted Cruz failed to deliver an endorsement of Trump, and Melania Trump failed to deliver a wholly original speech. Both distractions have contributed to a divisive, destructive gathering—one that Nate Silver describes as ‘flirting with disaster’. Trump has just delivered his campaign speech, which you can watch here with a side of fact-checking (and here and here). If you’re after a blow-by-blow, you could do worse than check out the liveblogs filed for New York magazine by the august Andrew Sullivan (nights 1, 2, 3 and 4). And with the Donald now one step closer to the nuclear codes, it’s a good moment to explore his grey matter through these two pieces: one on Trump’s potential sociopathy; the other a psychologist’s dive into Trump’s personality. But the final thought rests with Jeffery Goldberg from The Atlantic, who claims Hillary Clinton is now effectively running against Vladimir Putin:

‘Donald Trump, should he be elected president, would bring an end to the postwar international order, and liberate dictators, first and foremost his ally Vladimir Putin, to advance their own interests. The moral arc of the universe is long, and, if Trump is elected, it will bend in the direction of despotism and darkness.’

A few research efforts and publications have bubbled up this week. Brookings’ Order from Chaos project has this month taken the temperature of US alliances and security partnerships in East Asia, with chapters focused on Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines, Singapore and Taiwan. If you haven’t yet come across New America’s worthwhile international security data project, it’s a veritable goldmine of facts and figures on MENA drone strikes and US extremism. And finally, fresh out of Copenhagen comes Foresight, a new effort honing in on climate change and energy issues. Catch up with the slick, scholarly Scandi-chic mag here.

Last Friday’s coup attempt by a small faction within the Turkish Armed Forces across Istanbul and Ankara has received significant airplay across the world’s media. Now, as the failed coup’s impact is felt, analysts are looking at what comes next for the country. The Atlantic has been live-blogging major updates relating to the coup attempt and its aftermath, concluding with Wednesday’s declaration of a three month state of emergency. For another firsthand account, this podcast (18 mins) from CSIS includes an interview with Bulent Aliriza who was in Ankara as the coup took unfolded. Looking to the future, Foreign Policy thinks that Turkey will now be unable to answer Washington’s call to provide greater assistance in the fight against Daesh; The New Yorker asks how President Erdoğan will use the coup to his political advantage; and CSIS looks into security implications from the putsch for the wider Eastern Mediterranean. Wired also has two stellar offerings on Turkey: the first on how the coup attempt played out on social media, and the second on Wikileaks’ ‘Erdoğan emails’—294,548 emails leaked from AKP HQ in response to the government’s brutal post-coup purges.

Want to catch ‘em all? There are plenty of people around the world who want otherwise, as backlash against the viral game Pokémon GO was felt this week, with some even suggesting that the game’s use of smartphone cameras could be a high-tech spying tool. That’s been the rhetoric in Indonesia, where on-duty police have been banned from hunting Pokémon; in Egypt, where Pikachu and pals have elicited national security concerns; in Saudi Arabia, where clerics have renewed a fatwa on Pokémon; and in Russia, where the game has been branded a ‘CIA plot’. Beyond espionage, others are face-palming over gamers hunting Pokémon in Auschwitz, Arlington Cemetery and the 9/11 memorial.

Podcasts

CSIS has the podcast goods on China this week. Bonnie Glaser sits down with Philippe Le Corre to discuss how Brexit will impact on China (28 mins); Scott Kennedy on Beijing’s 13th Five-Year Plan (19 mins); and Peter Mattis and Christopher Johnson on the origin, role, practices and structure of China’s esoteric intelligence bureaucracy (56 mins).

The Diplomat also weighs in, with South China Sea heavies Ankit Panda and Prashanth Parameswaran offering their thoughts (21 mins) on the impact of last week’s Tribunal ruling on geopolitics and security in the Indo–Pacific.

Videos

CSIS’ recently hosted a discussion on technological innovation with William Roper, director of the US Strategic Capabilities Office. Roper offers an insider’s perspective (1 hr) on how defense innovation in the 21st century will differ from previous experiences for the Department of Defense. It’s definitely worth sticking around for Q&A, too.

Earlier this week, Politico premiered a new series of short videos, ‘Retro Report’, which will run every day over the week and a half that the Republican and Democratic parties hold their conventions. The series will explore eight significant US presidential conventions and draw parallels between them and the state of US politics today. The first four episodes are already available: Episode 1: The Power of the Delegate (6 mins); Episode 2: The Mess in Chicago (6 mins); Episode 3: How it started (4 mins); and Episode 4: The Outsider Republican (6 mins).

Events

Canberra: Richard Fontaine, head of the Center for a New American Security in Washington D.C., continues his tour of Australia for a few more weeks, so mark your diary for 8 August and get along to hear some wisdom. Fontaine will be at the ANU’s National Security College where he will sketch out US foreign policy futures under the next president. Register here.

Sydney: With Prime Minister Abe having been returned with a supermajority in the Diet, now’s as good a time as any to check in on how the Japanese economy is faring. And there’s no better bunch to do that with than has been assembled by AsiaLink, including two serving Ambassadors and corporate heavyweights. Sign up and head to PwC Sydney at midday on Friday 29 July.

Lying and leadership

Image courtesy of Flickr user Alan Cleaver

This election season has been marked by frequent charges of dishonesty. During Britain’s ‘Brexit’ debate, each side charged the other with distorting the truth, though the speed with which the ‘Leave’ camp has been disowning its campaign promises, and the ‘Remain’ camp’s claims have come true, suggests which was telling it like it is. In the United States’ presidential election campaign, Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, seldom referred to his closest competitor in the primaries without calling him ‘Lying Ted Cruz’.

Similarly, Trump rarely misses an opportunity to refer to Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, without attaching the prefix ‘Crooked’. When she recently delivered a careful speech on foreign policy, Trump responded by calling her a ‘world-class liar’. But, according to PolitiFact, a Pulitzer prize-winning organization that checks the veracity of political statements, 60% of the claims by Trump that it investigated since he began his campaign have been deemed false or ‘Pants on Fire’ false, versus 12% for Clinton.

Some cynics shrug off such exchanges between candidates as typical behavior by politicians. But that’s too facile, because it ignores serious questions concerning how honest we want our political leaders and our political discourse to be.

In fact, we may not want our political leaders to tell the literal truth all the time. In wartime or during a counterterrorism operation, deception may be a necessary condition of victory or success—which clearly is in our interest.

Other cases are less dramatic but no less important. Sometimes, leaders have objectives that differ from those of a large part of their followers; rather than revealing the differences, they deceive their followers. When such actions are self-serving, as in cases of corruption or narcissistic ego gratification, moral censure is easy and appropriate. In contrast, other leaders with different objectives from their followers invest heavily in educating those who would oppose them to a different point of view.

In some instances, leaders find it impossible to educate their followers adequately in time, or their followers are too deeply divided to reach a consensus that will sustain collective action. In such circumstances, some leaders may take a paternalist view and decide to deceive their followers for what they see as their larger or later good.

For example, as Senate Majority Leader, Lyndon B. Johnson deceived his southern supporters in order to pass the 1957 civil rights act. Charles de Gaulle did not reveal his strategy for Algerian independence when he came to power in 1958, because he knew that doing so would doom it to failure. John F. Kennedy misled the public about the withdrawal of US nuclear warheads from Turkey in the deal that peacefully ended the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

Moreover, Franklin D. Roosevelt lied to the American public about a German attack on a US destroyer, in an effort to overcome isolationist resistance to helping Britain before World War II. And Winston Churchill once said that the truth may be ‘so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies’.

The fact that leaders’ ends may sometimes justify violating norms about honesty does not mean that all lies are equal, or that we must suspend our moral judgment in such cases. Machiavellian deception is often part of a strategy, for example, in bargaining or even in bringing a group to accept new goals. But intentions matter. Deception that is purely self-serving turns from a strategy that may benefit others into selfish manipulation.

Even if one admits that deception may sometimes be necessary, one can still ask about the importance of the goal, the availability of alternative means to achieve it, whether the deception is likely to spread through precedent or example, the damage done to various victims, and the deceivers’ accountability (whether their behavior can be discovered and explained later). In his book, When Presidents Lie, the historian Eric Alterman concludes that presidential lies ‘inevitably turn into monsters that strangle their creators’.

And presidents may set bad precedents. When Roosevelt lied about the German attack on the destroyer Greer in 1941, he set a low bar for Johnson’s highly embellished description of a North Vietnamese attack on US naval vessels, which led to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of 1964.

It’s all too easy for leaders to convince themselves that they’re telling a noble lie for the good of their followers, when in fact they’re merely lying for political or personal convenience. That makes it all the more important in a democracy that we carefully examine the nature of the tradeoffs between ends and means that leaders make. There may indeed be situations where we would approve a political leader telling us a lie, but such cases should remain rare and subject to careful scrutiny. Otherwise, we debase the currency of our democracy and lower the quality of our political discourse.

This is why it’s a mistake for cynics to shrug off Trump’s rhetoric as simply one of the things politicians do. If PolitiFact and other similar organizations are correct, politicians aren’t all the same when it comes to lying. Trump has made many more false statements than any of his opponents, and few (if any) could pass the test of not being self-serving. An independent and vigorous press that checks the truth is crucial to preserving the integrity of democracy; but so is an electorate that resists cynicism and the debasement of political discourse.

Trump and China

Image courtesy of of Flickr user Gage Skidmore

The first question Chinese officials ask Americans when they come to Beijing these days has little to do with economic policy, or the South China Sea, or the particulars of global instability. They focus on Donald Trump, their queries filled with a mixture of astonishment and trepidation.

‘What about Donald Trump?’ Liu He, the chief economic adviser to Xi Jinping, asked the entourage of Secretary of State, John Kerry, during their June meetings for the Security and Economic Dialogue, the prime venue for US–China policy making.

‘Who are his advisers and what are his policies?’ a senior Communist Party official asked Bonnie Glaser, a China specialist at CSIS, when she visited in early July.

In those encounters, there’ve been no flippant comments by the Chinese favoring Trump. Second thoughts are in abundance. If any Chinese policy-makers favoured Trump in the early going, there’s buyer’s remorse now.

For a whileas Trump ascended during the Republican primary season and decimated a big field of competitorshe was viewed as not so bad, not so scary, and almost certainly preferable to Hillary Clinton.

There was admiration for his come-from-behind winning streak. He would modify his policies in office, he would have sensible advisers, he wouldn’t dare start an all-out trade war, the Chinese said. And his bravado in insisting that during his presidency the United States would withdraw its troops from Japan and South Korea had great appeal to Chinese army officers. They chose to overlook the second part of Trump’s plan—that Japan and South Korea would be allowed to develop their own nuclear arsenals.

And there was an allure to Trump because he was a businessman. China could always do a business deal, according to this thinking. But most of all, Trump seemed an interesting prospect based on the fact he wasn’t Hillary Clinton. In fact, he was the anti-Hillary.

Clinton has a special place in the pantheon of Chinese antipathies. She earned China’s displeasure when she came to Beijing as First Lady in 1995 for a UN women’s conference and declared that women’s rights were human rights. Early on, as Secretary of State, she publicly called on China to stop its bullying tactics in the South China Sea. Much to Beijing’s annoyance, she ordered a Chinese human rights activist, Chen Guangcheng, to be given shelter in the US embassy in 2012, and then personally negotiated his departure for the United States. She promoted the pivot to Asia, seen in China as a pure containment strategy.

‘Some people in China favor Trump over Hillary not because they like him, but because they dislike her—she is regarded as ideologically biased against China and strategically hostile towards China,’ said Wu Xinbo, director of the Center for American Studies at the Institute for International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai.

‘Trump appears to be more focused on economic issues with China, which of course will cause troubles too. But economic friction is more manageable than political and strategic differences.’

But as Trump has been unmasked in the American press, the portrayals of his fraudulent business deals have made for second thoughts. His efforts to be more anti-China than Clinton are nerve-making for Chinese officials.

He calls China’s unbalanced trade with the United States ‘the greatest theft in the history of the world,’ vowing to slap 45% tariffs on Chinese imports. Right there, Trump is challenging the pro-trade American economic orthodoxy that the Chinese count on.

Clinton has veered off the free trade path too, turning her back on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the key economic component to the Obama administration’s pivot to Asia that she helped engineer.

But with the slowdown in the Chinese economyand fears of global instability in the wake of the upheavals in EuropeClinton, an experienced policymaker, is looking a surer bet to senior Chinese leaders.

Some Chinese may well have been put off by recent revelations about Trump suing his Hong Kong partners for US$1 billion in a major New York City real estate deal in the 1990s. (He lost in the courts).

Trump—who dislikes traveling abroad—visited Hong Kong to do the deal, but plainly didn’t enjoy the place, his investors said later. (He had difficulty with chopsticks and was put off by the food). It’s not clear whether he’s ever visited mainland China.

Senior Chinese officials are obsessed by the US, the rival nation they hope to overtake. They read, they study, they talk and they visit America to find out as much as they can. Some Chinese policy makers, like Yang Jiechi, the state councilor, have special friends in high places. In Mr Yang’s case, he’s on good terms with the Bush family.

Donald Trump is unsettling because he didn’t figure in Beijing’s calculations. They have no idea who his advisers are, Glaser said. The Chinese are accustomed to dealing with the establishment in Washington, but there’s no-one they can call to get a reading on Trump. When asked about his inner circle, Glaser said she replied that few in Washington knew his advisers either. In fact, she told them, he seems to have hardly any foreign policy or economic counsellors.

The growing unease about Mr Trump among Chinese officials doesn’t mean that he’s lost his luster among the Chinese public.

His anti-Muslim tirades, his celebrity status—Chinese like brands, and he’s a brand par excellence—earn high approval ratings on China’s Internet. A Trump Fan Club and Great Man Donald Trump group have attracted plenty of followers.

In an online poll by Global Times, a tabloi-style state owned newspaper, 54% of respondents say they supported a Trump presidency, far more than the roughly 40% of Americans who did towards the end of the primary season.

If Trump prevails over Clinton, there will surely be buyer’s remorse among the Chinese public, too.

An introverted Anglosphere?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Mirai Takahashi

Recent tumultuous political events—including Australia’s election—seem likely to produce a troubling set of strategic consequences. Some of those consequences will be reflected in the strategic policies of key individual Western states. But they’re also likely to be reflected in a broader sense, as part of the pattern of shifting weights and balances in global politics—where we’re likely to see a diminishing role for the Anglosphere in shaping strategic outcomes.

The Anglosphere is typically seen as a select group of countries: the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and—sometimes—Ireland. The group falls naturally into three geographic pairs, and in each pairing there’s one extroverted strategic player (the US, Britain and Australia) and another less extroverted one (Canada, Ireland, New Zealand). Collectively, the group exercises an influence on international relations disproportionate to its small size.

Quite suddenly, though, an important question has arisen about the prospective future role of the Anglosphere. As anyone can now see, there’s a problem. The three most extroverted players are all—to a greater or lesser degree—turning inward.

‘America first’ is now the dominant theme in US politics, and—with the Washington Metro broken and the US middle class resentful over its declining fortunes—it seems likely that even a Clinton presidency might involve a step away from continuing global engagement rather than a step back towards it. A Trump presidency might easily result in Washington taking rather more than one step away.

Across the Atlantic, the UK is wrestling with life after deciding to leave the European Union. That’s no small task. For the better part of a decade, British political leaders are likely to be absorbed in the all-encompassing task of ‘reinventing’ Britain. In short, the national enterprise is likely to trump (no pun intended) the regional or global one. It seems that the UK—traditionally an active security contributor in many parts of the world—will be playing a smaller role in coming years. Apart from activities deemed essential to national reinvention, foreign and strategic issues seem likely to receive fewer resources and less leadership attention.

And so we come to the third extroverted member of the Anglosphere—Australia itself. After its election on 2 July, the outcome of which remains uncertain, we might well be staring down the barrel of a more hesitant Australia in regional and global affairs. Regardless of whether we end up with a minority government or a government clinging to a bare majority in the House of Representatives, the political climate is unlikely to be one to support a particularly venturesome strategic policy. That’s somewhat ironic given the theoretical boldness of the most recent Defence White Paper—the key internal policy parameters of which must surely be in doubt in the new post-election world.

The ruling on the South China Sea by the International Court of Arbitration, for example, seems likely to be issued (on 12 July) while Australia’s still enjoying a period of caretaker government. And grander objectives that Canberra had been keen to explore—including the question of whether the time is now ripe for a new, more action-oriented security structure in Southeast Asia—seem more likely to wither than to flower.

True, there are a couple of questionable assumptions contained in the reasoning outlined above. Even a US standing a little further back from the world, for example, will remain a strong force for good. Even a Britain out of the European Union will remain a Britain inside of NATO. And even a minority Australian government could rely upon a tradition of bipartisanship—at least amongst the two major parties—to ensure the wheels didn’t completely fall off its foreign and defence policy.

The argument, though, is over a difference of degree rather than a difference of kind. If we are facing a future where the US is stepping back from the international role it has played since World War 2, where Britain’s absorbed in a project of national reinvention, and where Australia’s more fixated upon domestic issues and politics, then we should expect strategic consequences to follow. In short, Western influence in the world is likely to be receding at a critical time in international affairs—when the world stands at a new inflection point, and the old strategic verities are fading. Critics of the Anglosphere mightn’t have liked it, but I suspect they’ll rue the waning of its influence.

Is there a cure for introversion? Possibly. All three countries might be forced back into more extroverted roles by a major international crisis. On the other hand, I suspect they’re not going to be dragged back into their traditional roles by a set of troubles that creep in on little cat feet.

The Strategist Six: Kurt Campbell

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Welcome to The Strategist Six, a feature that provides a glimpse into the thinking of prominent academics, government officials, military officers, reporters and interesting individuals from around the world.

1. What are the major challenges facing the future of the US role in Asia?

The biggest challenge that the United States currently faces is not the result of external variables, but rather our domestic politics. Among both Republicans and Democrats, this election has called into question some of the foundational aspects that have defined how the United States has engaged in Asia for generations, such as strong support for alliances, careful engagement with China, an emphasis on trade, and a recognition of the importance of defence relationships in Asia. Each of these items are in play in American domestic politics at the moment and the questions that the campaigns have raised, both in the left and right of the United States, are likely to have seismic consequences in Asia for some time. I think many in Asia now believe that regardless of who wins the Presidential election, even if it’s a more reassuring candidate, bigger questions are now in play about the future of the US role in the region.

2. If you were advising the next US President on their Asia policy, what would your counsel be about maintaining domestic support for the U.S.’s central role in Asia?

The historic status quo to maintaining domestic support has been much less active than what is required today. I think this new era requires much more explanation and context to the American domestic political environment in order to ensure that there’s a broad understanding about why we do what we do in Asia. If you look at how the United States has handled issues in the Middle East, you see dozens of speeches by President Obama and former President Bush, explaining why we took various steps in Iraq and Afghanistan. We’ve not done a comparable set of explanations about why we need to do what we do in Asia, so I’d very much like to see a dedicated, persistent and sustained effort by the next US President to explain to Americans why the lion’s share of the history of the 21st century will be written in Asia, and why we have to play a strong and determined role in this critical region.

3. You were one of the main architects of the Obama administration’s pivot to Asia. What’s your assessment of the pivot almost five years on?

I think the pivot, or the rebalance, has proceeded in fits and starts, but I am proud of elements where we undeniably made a major contribution. You’re starting to see across the board a strong recognition that we need to step up our game in Asia—in defence strategy, the TPP, diplomacy and our commitment to multilateral institutions. But at the same time, it’s undeniable that the amount of focus at a senior level of our government has been on the Middle East and South Asia for over 10 years, so finding the wit and wisdom to engage appropriately in Asia remains a tough balance. I think we’re doing better, but to be truly effective in Asia it will take a succession of Presidents who are committed to ensuring the US’s important role in the region, not just one administration. However, I think that overall President Obama has made a very good effort in turning the page on a period in which we were almost exclusively focused on the Middle East; there’s now a broader recognition that we need to do more in Asia.

4. While the United States and China may not be predestined for conflict, to what extent is it now inevitable that the two countries have now entered a contest for regional leadership?

I think the United States and China recognise, at a fundamental level, that despite misgivings they must work together going forward. Sharing leadership responsibilities will be difficult for both countries but nevertheless that’s the essential purpose of high-level diplomacy between Beijing and Washington. It’s true that China wants to play a larger role in Asia but I would still argue that the US’s efforts and role have been unique in how we’ve provided the operating system of Asia. Much of China’s actions have to do with securing its immediate neighbourhood —almost in the way a 19th century power would do so with respect to spheres of influence. The rest of the region must convey quite directly to China the expectation that Beijing plays a reassuring and stabilising role in an increasingly complex Asia. That’s going to be essential.

5. How is Asia viewing the US elections? What kind of questions is Donald Trump raising for US allies and partners in the region?

I get questions everywhere I go about it. I’ve worked on Asia for almost 30 years and I’ve never seen this level of anxiety, nor these kinds of questions about the implications of Trump’s candidacy and the current state of American politics for the continuing US role in Asia. We do what we can to be reassuring, and explain that the US has been underestimated or counted out many times before and almost always has rebounded and demonstrated hidden reserves. The Trump candidacy is something quite different though. Almost every major initiative that the US has undertaken in Asia has been bipartisan. Trump’s departures from these Asian orthodoxies are potentially destabilising and dangerous, and I think coddling dictators, encouraging proliferation, disdaining our allies doesn’t constitute a coherent foreign policy. I think if such an unbalanced approach were implemented it would undermine literally decades of hard bipartisan work to advance and strengthen the U.S. role in Asia. It would be deeply counterproductive and profoundly regrettable.

6. What is the biggest threat to global security?

Unchecked climate change is the biggest challenge to global security—in ways that are both direct and pernicious. There is a view somehow that the threat of climate change lies well in the horizon. I do not think that’s the case. We’re already seeing its effects: more intense storms, desertification, coral bleaching, changing food patterns, and rising sea levels. All of these things have extraordinarily negative potential consequences. And I am of the view that discussions around climate change are intrinsically tied with the challenges of the South China Sea; it isn’t somehow a soft issue. Climate security is central to American and global purpose going forward.

ANZUS in Trumpland—should we have seen it coming?

Andrew Davies’ recent post on the possibility of Donald Trump as US President presents an interesting alternative future that could cause a fundamental rewrite of our defence plans. In concluding, he noted Andrew Carr’s concerns that the lack of deep thinking about such potential black swan events suggests our defence thinking is trapped within strongly institutionalised boundaries. There’s much truth in that, but first let’s unpack the matter.

Alternative futures are useful: the future starts here and spreads out into the future cone that most will be familiar with. You just need to decide what aspects of the range of possible futures form the left and right of arc for planning purposes.

The Shell Oil Company was a major early player in the field, and is credited with foreseeing, in the early 1980s, that a seismic change was coming in the Soviet Union. The alternative futures method gave Shell an inkling that something was up, while the vast intelligence agencies of the Western defence establishment missed it because the defence agencies dealt in what was expected to happen not what might happen.

The Trump phenomenon isn’t unexpected either. Not Trump personally—albeit Shell was tracking Gorbachev before the CIA—but rather the broader issues and deeper trend lines that underpin his worldview and its popularity with significant portions of the American public. I’ll claim a little credit here. Way back in 2004, I devised an alternative future based on two axes: America being deeply involved in the world or not, and globalisation deepening or not. There were reasons for that choice however, to cut to the chase, those two variables can also be found in a close reading of Hugh White’s 2000 Defence White Paper (PDF). Take a bow Hugh, but this also shows those were well-known variables even back then.

If you use those two variables as drivers you end up with an alternate future chart like this (see link for larger version):

If you haven’t used these diagrams before, take a minute to understand what it’s telling you. There are four broad possible worlds described in the diagram. There’s no attempt to assign likelihoods, but they allow us to explore the differences between them.  (I haven’t changed the words since its 2004 airing hence there are some anachronisms i.e. G7 might be the G20 now).

In the diagram, I’ve estimated where Trump’s policies fall (red star) and where Hillary Clinton’s policies fall (blue star). Andrew Davies’ discussion of alliance abandonment, nuclear proliferation, trade wars with China and putting ‘America First’ explains why Trump’s star is situated where it is. In that world we might indeed find ourselves ‘Home Alone’—with all the opportunities and worries that presents. The various issues noted in the diagram might be found in a Trump world, though not necessarily simultaneously. Even so, we can get a feeling for the overall ambience and texture of such a possible time.

Clinton’s polices aren’t without concerns, especially with her apparent conversion to oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. While the rebalance to the Pacific may continue and a tougher line be taken overall, globalisation may also be under threat in a future Clinton world.  The recent Brexit vote perhaps confirms this opposition to globalisation is more than just American.  The ‘Cold War Redux’ world retains a deeply engaged America but it’s not all good news for us. Regardless who becomes President we mightn’t get today’s world, as the two Andrews imply is the position the 2016 Defence White Paper assumes, but a different, unexpected one.

How would our new 20-year defence acquisition plans fare in either of the two worlds we might be on track for? The point of alternative futures for defence planning is that the force structure should be useful in whichever future emerges. Force structure isn’t based on the future you expect or wish for, but on the range of futures you think possible. The art is to invest across all possible worlds, rather than over or under-investing in any one future. The table below—derived from the earlier diagram—shows a balanced investment approach.

Force Tasks Budget Allocation by Percent
Regional Security 36%
Niche forces for Coalition operations 26%
Managing Transnational non-state actors 17%
Defence of Australia 17%
R&D 4%

This reveals why Australia’s defence plans don’t embrace alternative futures. If you hedge across different futures, some ‘sacred cows’ might fall by the wayside because of dubious future utility. There are a range of methodologies available to help people plan for the future. Alternative futures is one—which can also be used in reverse as Assumptions Based Planning (PDF). There is also grand strategy, risk management, opportunism, design thinking and non-linear thinking.  Each is appropriate to solving specific problems, and no single approach addresses all matters.

The issues raised by Donald Trump’s ascent were arguably readily foreseeable and should accordingly already have been incorporated into our latest Defence White Paper and future force structure plans. But the abovementioned posts by Davies and Carr suggest otherwise. People will argue that ‘Trump won’t win so who cares?’, but I’ll side with Carr. Thinking outside of the constraints our defence thinking is trapped within becomes more important as the level of uncertainty ramps up. Alternative futures offer one way to do that.

Brexit, Trump, sub-zero bonds, China: a Kiwi perspective

Image courtesy of Flickr user Ken Teegardin

Britain will today vote to leave the European Union or not. In November the United States will vote to have Donald Trump as President or not.

Either would send global shockwaves. A rocky two years would follow a ‘Brexit’ vote as exit terms were negotiated. It would weaken the European Union, with geopolitical implications. There would be trans-Atlantic, European and wider economic impacts.

A Trump presidency’s impact at home and abroad would be unpredictable, a potentially disorderly political and economic force in an already increasingly disordered world. Even votes to stay or for Hillary Clinton would, if the margins are narrow, cause global political and economic shivers.

Brexit-ism and Trump-ism are symptoms of deep ills, reactions against all-knowing and all-owning elites who have presided over growing inequalities and other societal reshapings that have upset, disempowered, dispossessed or scarred ‘everyday’ folk who feel left out and/or let down, outcasts-in-their-own-lands.

Across Europe this mood has lifted anti-elite parties’ votes and installed anti-elite regimes in Greece and Poland. So even ‘Bremain’ or pro-Clinton votes would not be durably definitive. The post-1945 liberal-democratic hegemony of centre-right/centre-left parties in the ‘west’ is ending. What comes next is unclear—and western-type countries alone will not decide as they have for 250 years.

There are other economic threats, some potentially systemic. One stems from central banks’ slip into negative interest rates—so far in Japan, the Eurozone, Switzerland, Denmark and Sweden. The United States’ Federal Reserve, which lifted back off ground-zero (to 0.25%-0.5%) only last December, has stalled and might even head back down.

Trading banks which need to deposit funds with negative-rate central banks have to pay, not receive, interest. That squeezes margins. In addition, an investor scramble for safe havens amid global economic sluggishness and political instability has crashed the yield on sovereign government bonds. Japan’s 10-year and 15-year bonds this month went below zero, joining Switzerland’s 10-years. Germany’s 10-years went negative last week.

Rating agency Fitch calculated $US10 trillion in sovereign bonds globally were sub-zero—before Germany’s went negative. This has serious implications for pension funds and insurance companies’ reserves. Japan’s Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi said last week it was considering giving up its primary dealership in government bonds. Several German savings banks plus the big Commerzbank have looked at storing notes in vaults to avoid depositing funds with the European Central Bank.

That is the equivalent of ‘everyday’ folk stuffing notes under the mattress. The alternative is no better. If interest rates start rising at some point, that would cut bonds’ capital value, which could cause a big shock—a ‘supernova’, Janus Capital’s Bill Gross said.

And the global economy hasn’t yet ‘recovered’ its GDP and trade levels after the 2007-08 global financial crisis (GFC). That includes China. It spent heavily on infrastructure and houses to offset the GFC. That added massively to debt, including now tottering corporate debt.

That and the many other distortions in the autocrat-run Chinese economy (and society) are increasing the potential for a major domestic shock, which would have global repercussions—as suppliers, including Australia, found when China wound down its infrastructure splurge and so imports of iron and other minerals.

These multiple turmoils spell economic and political risk for New Zealand, direct—limited in the case of Brexit and Trump—and indirect through the global impact—potentially serious. Is the government here nervous? Not if you sat in on Bill English’s bland, near-pollyanna opening words to Parliament’s finance and expenditure committee last Thursday.

He talked of GDP growth at near 3% (actually, migration-driven), low unemployment, a high work participation rate, more jobs, wage rises faster than low inflation, low interest rates, the infrastructure build and an increasingly diversified export sector which has weathered the dairy crash. All this underpinned confidence and promised reasonable business investment.

English did acknowledge ‘a range of risks’ but did not detail them. So how prepared are he and his advisers for a shock?  

There is a fiscal ‘cushion’. Banks meet the Reserve Bank’s liquidity stress tests. The Reserve Bank, Treasury, Financial Markets Authority and Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment share information fortnightly on systemic risks. The Budget economic update explored some risks. The next long-term fiscal forecast is canvassing a wider range of potential diversions than past such forecasts.

But officials are not exploring ‘what-if’ scenarios so as not to be blindsided, as they were by the GFC, if things go really bad in unexpected ways.

Well, there is always the mattress.

Trump and the traditions of American foreign policy (part 2)

MMGAThe Jacksonian foreign policy call to arms, as we argued in part one, isn’t driven by the moral underpinnings of the Wilsonian tradition or the quest for an ‘open door’ world of the Hamiltonian tradition. Rather it’s instead animated by the instinct, in the first instance, to protect members of the ‘folk community’ from threat. The influence of that attitude can be seen in a variety of historical and contemporary examples.

For instance, Jacksonians were against the US intervention in Bosnia, due to limited threat this posed to direct American security interests, but were accepting of the push for US intervention against Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, as the Iraqi dictator’s move was perceived as a threat to world oil supplies, and hence, a potential threat to the economic well-being of Jacksonian America.

Similar rationales have been evident in Jacksonian support for American interventions in both World Wars. Here, it wasn’t the atrocities committed by the Central Powers, the Nazi’s nor the Imperial Japanese army but rather the sinking of American ships in the Atlantic and the attack on Pearl Harbour that assisted presidents Wilson and Roosevelt respectively to overcome the ingrained American aversion to ‘foreign entanglements’.

In the latter case, as FDR biographer Jean Edward Smith has documented, the President, during the tense US–Japanese diplomacy prior to Pearl Harbour, was ‘like Lincoln prior Fort Sumter’ in wanting ‘Japan to be perceived as the aggressor’ in the event of open conflict.

That desire to be seen as the righteously aggrieved party to a conflict also speaks to the importance Jacksonian’s attach to the protection of ‘national honour’ and ‘reputation’:

‘Honor…is not simply what one feels oneself to be on the inside; it is also a question of the respect and dignity one commands in the world at large. Jacksonian opinion is sympathetic to the idea that our reputation – whether for fair dealing or cheating, toughness or weakness – will shape the way others treat us’.

Such reputational calculus has been evident throughout the history of American foreign policy from Robert Kennedy’s assertion in his memoir, Thirteen Days, that he advised his brother, President John F. Kennedy, against a Pearl Habour-esque ‘sneak attack’ against Soviet missile sites in Cuba, to the Jacksonian opprobrium directed at President Obama after he failed to follow through on his ‘red line’ statement regarding Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons.

All of those key themes—protection of the community from direct threat, narrower definition of the ‘national interest’ and protection of American ‘honour’ and ‘reputation’—have been evident in Trump’s various public statements on foreign policy.

Take for instance Trump’s ‘plan’ to ‘bomb the shit out’ of ISIS and ‘take their oil’. That speaks both to the Jacksonian desire to protect its community from direct threat (construed in this instance as both physical and economic) and Jacksonian conceptions of ‘honour’ (ISIS are an inherently ‘dishonourable’ adversary and therefore the US is justified in utilising any means to destroy them).

Such themes pose problems for those who would have us believe that Trump is a ‘Nixon-Kissinger realist’. The Jacksonian tradition isn’t entirely consistent with even Nixon and Kissinger’s rather narrow conception of foreign policy ‘realism’. Indeed, we would do well to recall here that Nixon and Kissinger themselves spent much of their time in office assuaging (or to be unkind, pandering) to Jacksonian opinion as they attempted to extricate the US from Vietnam without losing ‘credibility’ with adversaries and allies alike. It wasn’t a coincidence that Nixon and Kissinger framed their strategy of withdrawal as ‘peace with honor’.

Jacksonians are also predisposed to be bloody-minded once the US is engaged in a conflict and resistant to rationales for their resolution short of ‘total victory’. Additionally, once adversaries are defined as an ‘enemy nation’ (for instance, Iran since 1979) it becomes extremely difficult for Jacksonian opinion to be swayed to support efforts at normalisation. Conversely, Jacksonian opinion, in the absence of direct threats to American security is likely to advocate a minimalist or, in the words of George W. Bush during the 2000 election campaign, a ‘humble’ foreign policy.

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, has rightly lambasted Trump’s disparate statements on foreign policy as ‘dangerously incoherent’.

Yet simply labelling such Trump assertions that the US should abandon long-standing alliances such as NATO if allies don’t ‘pay their own way’ or that it wouldn’t be a bad thing for South Korea and Japan or Saudi Arabia to acquire nuclear weapons as ‘dangerous’ doesn’t directly address the Jacksonian sentiments that underpin their appeal to Republican voters.

Clinton, along with the foreign policy establishment in Washington, would do well to recall Max Weber’s observation that while ‘Interests (material and ideal), not ideas, dominate directly the actions of men’ the ‘images of the world created by these ideas’ have very often served as switches determining the tracks on which the dynamism of interests kept actions moving.

Thus far in Trump’s rise as standard bearer for the GOP it’s clear that the Jacksonian tradition has been the ‘switch’ that has determined the tracks on which his foreign policy will run. Hillary Clinton and the foreign policy establishment ignore its influence at their peril.

Trump and the traditions of American foreign policy (part 1)

Image courtesy of Flickr user Little Koshka

In the wake of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s address to the Center for the National Interest in Washington DC on 27 April, there has been much conflicting punditry either decrying or justifying the foreign policy program sketched by ‘The Donald’.

Paul Pillar dismissed it as a ‘bumper sticker speech’. The foreign policy enunciated, Pillar argued, was not only ‘so general and vague as to be platitudinous’ but also laced with ‘blatant contradictions and inconsistencies’ such as Trump’s description of American Cold War foreign policy as ‘a golden age’ simultaneous with the dismissal of American ‘participation in the type of international institutions that were a major and even indispensable part of US policy during those years’.

Trump’s assertion that under his leadership the US would be ‘getting out of the nation-building business to focus on creating stability in the world’, led Daniel Larison of the The American Conservative to note that while ‘Many Americans will cheer the first part of this statement…the second part potentially commits the US to a very ambitious and activist role in the world’.

Such sentiments of restraint and a narrower definition of American national interests have led still others to find policy coherence where arguably none exists. Crispin Rovere, for example, on the basis of Trump’s 27 March interview with David Sanger and Maggie Haberman in the New York Times and his 27 July foreign policy speech, has claimed that Trump is a ‘Nixon-Kissinger realist’.

What has been missing from most of those reactions is an appreciation of the core well-springs of Trump’s musings on foreign policy: the Jacksonian tradition of American foreign policy detailed by Walter Russell Mead.

Robert J. Merry has come closest in that respect when he noted that the coming Trump–Clinton presidential contest is shaping as contest (among other things) between whether ‘nationalism’ or ‘globalism’ will guide American foreign policy. Trump’s ‘America First’ sloganeering places Trump in opposition not only to the group of neoconservatives that have had a stranglehold on GOP foreign policy debates in recent times but also to the broader post-Cold War consensus amongst Washington’s foreign policy establishment that US national security is best served by the US remaining the ‘indispensable nation’, in former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s oft quoted phrase, that brings both order and justice to the international system.

Merry argues that the strain of nationalism that Trump has tapped is driven by a number of foreign policy-relevant core sentiments. Trumpian nationalists, he argues: ‘don’t care about dominating world events’ but ‘want their country to be powerful, with plenty of military reach…to protect American national interests’; they ask ‘whether the national interest justifies the expenditure of American blood and treasure’ when interventions abroad are proposed; and the ‘fate of America’ is their primary consideration.

Mead argued that American foreign policy since the founding of the Republic has been defined by the evolution of four contrasting yet complementary traditions of foreign policy: the Hamiltonian (promotion of an ‘Open Door’ world), Jeffersonian (maintenance of a democratic system), Jacksonian (populist values, military strength), and Wilsonian (moral principle). A fundamental distinction amongst the four traditions is between those that that seek to perfect and protect the virtues of the Republic (Jeffersonian and Jacksonian) and those that seek to remake the world in its image (Hamiltonian and Wilsonian).

That concerns, in Walter McDougall’s memorable terms, the historical debate as to whether the United States would be a ‘promised land’ or ‘crusader state’. The history of American foreign policy since 1945 demonstrates that it has been the extroverted ‘crusader state’ Hamiltonian and Wilsonian traditions which have prevailed. However, the nascent nationalist–globalist divide depicted by Merry points to the recrudescence of the Jacksonian tradition.

That tradition is defined by a number of core characteristics that clearly resonate with Trump’s rise as the GOP’s standard bearer.

The Jacksonian tradition—named after the Republic’s 7th (and in his time, just as controversial as Trump) President Andrew Jackson—is based on what Mead terms a ‘community of political feeling’ defined by principles of populism, individualism, honour and courage.

Drawing on the work of David Hackett Fischer, Mead identifies the basis of the populism central to the Jacksonian tradition with the protestant ‘Scotch-Irish’ element of British colonisation of North America. The ‘Scotch-Irish’, Mead argues, shaped by centuries of conflict in Ireland, ‘established a culture and outlook formed by centuries of bitter warfare before they came to the United States’.

That tradition, according to Rogers M. Smith, established by the mid-19th century something akin to an ‘American creed’ whereby many Americans ‘identified membership in their political community not with freedom for personal liberal callings or republican self-governance…but with a whole array of particular cultural origins and customs’ strongly linked to North European ancestry, Protestantism, belief in the superiority of the ‘white race’, and patriarchal familial leadership.

In order to understand the importance of the Jacksonian tradition’s influence on American foreign policy one must recognise its central engine: Jacksonians ‘believe that government should do everything in its power to promote the well-being—political, economic, and moral—of the folk community. Any means are permissible in the services of this end, as long as they do not violate the moral feelings or infringe on the freedoms that Jacksonians believe are essential’.

It is that engine—as we shall discuss in part two—that has been driving Trump’s emergent foreign policy narrative.