Tag Archive for: United States

In search of a clear-eyed US strategy on Russia

An open letter signed by 103 experts recently called for the US to re-embrace its Cold War strategy for dealing with Russia. It argued that competition should be balanced with diplomacy and identified arenas for US–Russia cooperation: countering nuclear proliferation, protecting the environment and stabilising regional flashpoints. Above all, it advocated combining deterrence with détente.

That’s a laudable goal, but it’s also deeply flawed.

First, Russia has shown no signs whatsoever of being deterred by US policy. The opposite is true, as demonstrated by its adventurism in Crimea, Ukraine and Syria and its disinformation operations against the West.

Second, the Kremlin has no real interest in long-term détente with the US, mainly because Moscow’s price to assure its security—a privileged zone of influence in the former Soviet space—isn’t something that the US will agree to or that will be supported by Washington’s NATO allies.

Third, the rules that helped underpin Cold War stability no longer apply. Even if the international system becomes bifurcated again, China, not Russia, will occupy a major pole. Globally, nuclear politics is no longer dominated by the US–Soviet dyad. Nuclear multipolarity is shaping strategic interactions in far more complex ways than Cold War–style deterrence could mitigate. And the technological revolution has been a bonanza for hostile actors seeking to weaponise information, exacerbate divisions and degrade trust in democratic institutions.

The reality is that US–Russia competition is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. That means that another tepid ‘reset’, paying lip service to Russian insecurities while not actually addressing them, is similarly doomed to failure. But so, too, is symbolic posturing, such as stationing a few thousand troops in Poland and the Baltic states to mask a net drawdown of US forces in Europe. Equally unhelpful are suggestions about recreating the Sino-Soviet split in reverse to prompt Russia to balance against China. Such signals are read in Moscow as proof of Western weakness.

Instead of advocating a Russia policy based on old solutions or half measures, the US needs a more comprehensive Russia strategy that responds to new strategic, economic and transnational realities.

What might such a strategy look like? To begin with, it would need to move away from a Helsinki-style ‘baskets of competition and cooperation’ approach. Recognising that the US–Russia relationship will be competitive in virtually every field will permit a more comprehensive, proactive and layered strategy, cutting across linked areas instead of viewing them in isolation.

Where the US is strong relative to Russia, it can engage in denial activities. Incorporating conventional and nuclear balancing, as well as promoting geoeconomic and social cohesion, the US should seek to prevent Moscow from engaging in territorial expansionism, creating networks of vulnerable overdependence with itself at the centre or interfering in democratic elections.

This means committing to defend the Baltic states with significant troop deployments and offsetting Russian attempts at nuclear brinkmanship by deepening missile defences. Economically, denial means undercutting Russian commercial ventures, especially in energy and arms sales. Domestically, denial should seek to harden US critical infrastructure against cyberattacks, join up and centralise efforts to enhance election security, and legislate firmer punishments for domestic proxies engaged in interference.

The second layer of the US’s Russia strategy should be based on disruption. In the geopolitical and geoeconomic realm, this would include offering realistic investment alternatives in Central Asia and partnering with Nordic countries—and potentially even China—on free and open Arctic trade routes. In the cyber and intelligence domains, disruption includes messaging to Russian citizens on issues the Kremlin finds sensitive: political corruption, nomenklatura and economic and social dislocation.

As the third layer of US strategy, dilution should seek to mitigate Russian influence where Moscow already has an advantage. Two examples might be providing better alternatives to the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline and taking advantage of Ukraine’s participation in the ‘17+1’ framework of the Belt and Road Initiative. And, while healing America’s tribal divisions seems impossible, renewing and nurturing a sensible political centre would go some way towards inoculating the US against further meddling.

Ironically, China will increasingly have incentives to moderate Russia’s behaviour, including its attempts at territorial expansion, as a Sinocentric Eurasian order begins to take shape. Indeed, China’s gravitational pull in Central Asia, not to mention its investments in the Russian energy sector, give it far more leverage over Russia than the US can muster. It’s plausible, then, that the US and China could find their interests in relation to Russia converging.

A deny–disrupt–dilute strategy will require the US to abandon some of the more pernicious myths clouding its thinking about Russia. That includes the assumption that Moscow can somehow be ‘managed’. Just as for the naive ‘socialisation’ thesis about the liberal order’s ability to blunt Chinese ambitions, the Kremlin has long been awake to efforts to entrap it in Western institutions, especially because entrapment increases the risks to regime stability.

A related myth is that US–Russian relations will change for the better after Russian President Vladimir Putin leaves power. In fact, they’re likely to worsen. While Putin cares little for ideology, he has presided over a generation of politicians and policymakers who have mistrust of the US hardwired into their strategic thinking. And, although Russian elites worry about getting too close to Beijing, they also long ago concluded that the Western order is moribund: that Russia is on history’s winning side.

What does this imply for US strategy? Clearly, it won’t be achievable if Donald Trump is re-elected, but that would make a ‘deterrence and détente’ approach equally implausible. To work effectively, a deny–disrupt–dilute strategy will require Washington to engage more closely with its allies, recommit firmly to NATO and recognise that not all its partners will always feel similarly threatened. It will also have to reach beyond its alliance networks to others with interests in checking Russian ambitions.

This will be healthy for the US. It will go some way towards rebuilding its badly damaged global standing and remind it that persuasion and incentives rather than lazy rhetoric or blunt transactionalism are the key to protecting its national interests. It will demonstrate that Washington remains committed to standards of fairness and order. And ultimately it may make the US itself more resilient, more united and less fractured than the past four chaotic years have left it.

Trump admission shows he could have headed off America’s Covid-19 disaster

A popular narrative about the coronavirus pandemic, pushed by US President Donald Trump and his supporters, is that it’s all China’s fault because its leaders in Beijing lied.

China’s leaders knew early on that the virus was transmitted person to person through the air, these critics say, but didn’t disclose that information to the public. China’s president, Xi Jinping, was briefed about the seriousness of the threat at a secret, high-level meeting in January but he publicly stayed silent for days. And Xi continued to insist everything was under control, even as the virus was spreading fast.

Now it seems that the same narrative can be applied to Trump.

Thanks to the new book Rage by veteran journalist (and my former boss) Bob Woodward, we now know that Trump was told at a briefing on 28 January that the US faced the biggest pandemic since the 1918 Spanish flu—but he continued to publicly downplay the threat. He knew the virus was airborne and transmitted person to person, but he eschewed mask wearing and told people to go about their business. He continued to insist that everything was under control, even as the virus hit US shores and spread rapidly.

It now looks increasingly like the high US death toll and infection rate were due not to Xi’s mendacity, but Trump’s.

The US is approaching 6.6 million infections and 200,000 deaths. Despite Trump’s continued upbeat predictions of the virus petering out or a vaccine just around the corner, most public health experts expect infections and deaths to continue to climb, aided by colder weather and seasonal flus. The administration’s top infectious disease expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, has said Americans shouldn’t expect a return to previrus normalcy until sometime in 2021 at the earliest.

It did not have to be this way.

From the vantage point of Hong Kong, the US had plenty of warning signs and preparation time, if anyone had been paying attention.

By 23 January, even the Chinese Communist Party’s notoriously secretive leaders—loathe to admit any mistake and more concerned about saving face than lives—admitted there was a problem. They instituted a strict lockdown on the city of Wuhan, the virus epicentre, and surrounding Hubei province.

Five days later, on 28 January, even Hong Kong’s unpopular chief executive Carrie Lam conceded there was a public health danger and partially closed the territory’s border with China. On 3 February, she relented to public pressure and closed more crossings. Hong Kong recorded its first coronavirus death a day later.

In early February, after the Chinese New Year holiday break, Hongkongers almost universally began wearing face masks. For a few weeks, masks and even toilet paper became precious commodities. I began calling and sending emails and WhatsApp messages to friends in Singapore, Paris, New York and Maine asking them to please find face masks and mail them to me in Hong Kong.

In those early days, the reaction to our panic here was often more amusement than concern. Instead of preparing for the pandemic, Americans were sending email joke chains and internet memes about all the funny things people in Asia were using for masks. One showed an Asian man wearing a large plastic water jug over his head. Another was a photo of a young woman repurposing a pair of pink panties. Oranges, trash bin liners, bra cups and diapers all became homemade masks, and a source of amusement in the US.

Instead of getting ready, Americans were laughing.

More ominously, Asians and Asian Americans in the US became the target of verbal and physical abuse, often simply for wearing a mask.

With informed leadership, Americans could have used February to stock up on personal protective gear, to ensure hospital ventilators were evenly distributed, to build isolation wards, to designate quarantine centers and to develop a nationwide tracing system to track down close contacts of anyone found infected. But what was happening here in Asia was not a warning sign—it was the butt of jokes.

The reasons are many, but can mainly be put down to hubris. Americans have a sometimes misplaced view of their own ‘exceptionalism’. There’s a sense that two great oceans protect the US from the world’s ravages. And there’s a pitiful dearth of international news and a lack of attention to or interest in anything happening beyond America’s shores. If anyone had been paying any attention to news coming out of China and Hong Kong in January and February, the lethality of Covid-19, the fact that it was airborne and the efficacy of mask wearing would not have been surprising.

While most of the blame goes to Trump as president, Democrats are not immune from criticism. In the early Democratic presidential debates this year, the looming pandemic warranted hardly a mention. In late April, New York governor Andrew Cuomo, whose daily media briefings became appointed television viewing, dramatically announced this ‘shocker’ of a revelation: the virus could live for up to three days on stainless steel surfaces, and could linger in the air for hours.

That ‘news’ had been well known in Hong Kong since early February, which is why we began carrying small bottles of hand sanitiser, avoiding high-touch surfaces, regularly disinfecting offices and public toilets, and, above all, wearing masks when outside the home.

China is not blameless in this pandemic. The initial suppression of information from doctors in Wuhan and the failure to lock down the city earlier, before the peak Chinese New Year travel period, may well have contributed to the global spread. The early actions of Chinese officials should be thoroughly investigated, and China should be held to account for any deliberate missteps or intentional cover-up.

But while China dithered in December and the first half of January, the US dithered in late January and all of February, when the facts were clearly known. The confirmation of that comes directly from Trump’s interviews with Woodward.

‘You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed’, Trump said to Woodward on 7 February. ‘It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus’, Trump added. ‘This is deadly stuff.’

Another takeaway from Woodward’s book, also highlighted by former national security adviser John Bolton and in many other accounts, is Trump’s infatuation with autocratic strongmen like North Korea’s Kim Jung-un, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and, of course, Xi Jinping.

But Xi demonstrated how a strongman really acts in a crisis, assuming responsibility and instituting one of the world’s harshest lockdowns in Wuhan and other affected areas. If Trump had really wanted to emulate Xi, he might have declared a national emergency and ordered a lockdown of hard-hit cities and states. He could have invoked the Defense Production Act to ramp up manufacturing of ventilators, testing kits and personal protective equipment. He could have converted every government laboratory and every private one receiving federal funds into a coronavirus testing lab. He might have formed a massive civilian tracing corps, to track anyone infected and their close contacts.

A tough Wuhan-style lockdown would have elicited howls of objections and multiple court challenges and would likely have been overturned. But Trump could have portrayed himself as the tough guy willing to take the tough measures. And a strict lockdown after the first American coronavirus death at the end of February would probably have lasted two months and flattened the infection curve, allowing a reopening in May or June, as happened in China.

Now Wuhan is open, life has returned and schools have reopened. The city that was once synonymous with the virus and death just hosted a massive pool party with all the guests unmasked. The US, meanwhile, is recording 30,000 new cases and hundreds of deaths a day, with no end in sight.

As Trump campaigns for re-election, he continues to blame Xi and China for the toll the virus has inflicted on America. Instead, he should look in the mirror.

Heeding the lessons of 9/11

The anniversary of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States reminds us once again not only of its tragic consequences, but also of how fragile world politics has become since those events. The threat of violent extremist actions hasn’t dissipated, nor have we managed to build a stable global order in which the causes of extremism—whether religious or secular—are effectively addressed. This, together with Sino-American rivalry and the savagery of Covid-19, has led the world to a very risky transitional phase that, more than at any other time since World War II, calls for a wiser strategy of multilateral cooperation.

We all remember where we were when al-Qaeda unleashed its 9/11 horror, targeting the political, economic and military power of the US. Osama bin Laden and his ideologues naively believed that exacting revenge on the US for its interventionist behaviour would put the Muslim world on a sounder Islamic evolutionary course of change and development. They overlooked that it would also compel the US to engage in a more interventionist ‘war on terror’ on an almost global scale.

The American reprisal began with military operations in Afghanistan to punish the medievalist Islamic regime of the Taliban for harbouring bin Laden and his operatives and refusing to hand them over to the US. Then followed operations in dozens of other countries, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq based on false intelligence that Saddam Hussein’s secular dictatorship had linked up to Islamic al-Qaeda and had acquired weapons of mass destruction.

The US intervention in Afghanistan, backed by NATO and non-NATO allies, proved to be not only very costly, but also largely illusionary as the enemy could not easily be identified and targeted. Despite Washington’s claim that the US was capable of fighting two or even three wars at the same time, America was soon overstretched. While it had a plan for war, it had no effective strategy to bring peace to either Afghanistan or Iraq.

As former US secretary of defence Robert Gates recalled in his 2014 memoirs, the US was plunged into deadly fighting in countries whose national and regional complexities it had no clear understanding of. While the Afghan war dragged on as a ‘good war’ in the hope of a victory, the Iraq situation quickly turned into a mess. It seemed that the US had learned nothing from its Vietnam fiasco more than three decades earlier and the Soviet Union’s defeat in Afghanistan after a decade-long occupation in the 1980s.

The US finally pulled its forces out of Iraq by the end of 2011, leaving behind a broken country, only to come back to combat the rise of the so-called Islamic State four years later. Notwithstanding Washington’s triumphant claims, Iraq remains in the grip of long-term instability and insecurity, as does Afghanistan. Iraq has become a theatre of rivalry between two arch-enemies, the US and Iran, with Tehran calling more of the shots today in Baghdad than Washington does.

IS is no longer a territorial entity, also largely due to Russian–Iranian–Lebanese Hezbollah axis operations in Syria, but it hasn’t lost its capacity to strike targets in both Iraq and Syria. It’s hard to see when normal life will return to the traumatised populations of Iraq and Syria.

As for Afghanistan, the US initially toppled the Taliban government, but it didn’t defeat its forces. It dispersed al-Qaeda’s leaders and main operatives from the country but didn’t destroy them. Both forces regrouped and they are in close linkage to this day, fighting the US and its allies in a protracted war to the point of exhausting them.

President Donald Trump, a longstanding critic of America’s Afghan adventure, has found it expedient to cut US losses and make peace with its erstwhile enemy, the Taliban. Although most of the more than 100,000 US personnel in Afghanistan were withdrawn under President Barack Obama by the end of 2014, this year’s US–Taliban peace deal is enabling the withdrawal of most of the remainder of forces by the time of the US elections in November.

The Afghan government remains weak and corrupt, with writ over no more than 50% of the country, which gives the Taliban and their supporters, Pakistan in particular, reason to smell victory. Even al-Qaeda, which has become decentralised and smaller, and its rival, IS, which has gained ground in Afghanistan, can be optimistic about their chances in the war-torn country, all at the continued cost of the suffering Afghan people.

Will American and allied leaders look back and question what was gained from the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and, for that matter, from the war on terror as a whole? As more conflicts rage in theatres from Yemen to Libya, violent extremist individuals and groups from both sides of the Muslim and Western divide have remained resilient. The world appears to have paid a high price for the lack of a clear and sound political strategy focusing on dealing with those root causes of extremism that defy military solutions.

While Covid-19 has dampened to some extent the activities of violent extremist groups, and a disunited world has increasingly become concerned about a cold war between the US and China, the memory of 9/11 should warn us not to be complacent about the need for a viable world order that can lift us out of the geopolitical and ideological conflicts in favour of shared human values.

The pandemic’s geopolitical aftershocks

The triple crises of geopolitical power shifts, the Covid-19 pandemic and the economic disasters that flow from it will shape global politics, restructure global supply chains and bring an end to unregulated globalisation. The post-pandemic world is yet to take shape, but it’s likely to be as divided and bifurcated as occurred after World War II.

We are entering a new cold war with eyes wide open, not sleepwalking into it as some would argue. The vast Indo-Pacific region from the western Pacific to the western Indian Ocean is its ground zero.

Every crisis has winners and losers. China emerged as a winner after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks and the 2008 global financial crisis. The world’s worst pandemic will also have winners and losers. China could emerge bruised and much weakened in a post-Covid-19 world that is fragmented and has a more regulated style of ‘guided globalisation’.

China’s economy is particularly susceptible to declines in foreign investment, technology controls and export markets. A prolonged economic slowdown caused by the pandemic, war or natural disasters, potentially made worse by the exodus of multinational corporations (aka Chiexit), could even threaten the stability of China’s one-party regime.

After spending so much building its military capabilities and war-fighting doctrines, China may well be tempted to try them out, perhaps on a weaker neighbour. Manufacturing disputes where none exist is an old tactic, and China’s new territorial claims on tiny Bhutan’s eastern border illustrate the point.

While Chinese leader Xi Jinping appears keen to lock in China’s geostrategic gains, the ‘Quad’ democracies (the United States, Japan, India and Australia) and other like-minded nations want the Indo-Pacific to remain multipolar with Chinese power balanced by a continued US presence and by the power of other Asian states.

China’s vision of a power-and-hierarchy-based order clashes with the law-and-order-based vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific. Western, Japanese and other multinational corporations will aim to reduce their dependence on China. China’s mercantilism, its worldwide quest for resources, markets and bases, and its attempts to carve out a Sinosphere of influence will now face intense opposition from US allies and partners.

The world is transitioning from globalisation to regionalisation of trade. Rival trading and technology blocs will emerge through which governments will try to regulate the flow of goods, services, finance and labour in strategic sectors to safeguard their national interests. As economic issues get mired in domestic politics, trade and technology can become contentious and even explosive issues. Economic polarisation will sharpen political differences.

Tech wars over artificial intelligence, big data, robotics, biotech and 5/6G could result in a bifurcation of the global economy or usher in ‘one world, two systems’. Two separate blocs—driven primarily by national security concerns and economic or commercial interests—could create a fragmented world of conflicting visions and rules in the political, economic, technological, maritime, space and cyber domains.

The forces of geopolitics, ideology, nationalism and economic and technological competition will strain relations among nations. Countries big and small will be forced to choose sides. Fence-sitting will be difficult. To avoid coercion or collateral damage, most countries would prefer to trade with economies with which their interests and values converge.

Historically, small states are the first to feel the impact of major shifts in global geopolitics. Small and middle powers will find their room for manoeuvre severely constricted and the troubled waters extremely difficult to navigate.

The contest for the allegiance of small island states, from Samoa and Solomon Islands in the Pacific to Sri Lanka and the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean, is part of a bigger Indo-Pacific power game. The intense jockeying for influence and forward presence among major maritime powers seeking control of ports, logistical facilities and other pieces of critical infrastructure along the vital sea lanes will create new friction points. With the world’s largest navy, China would want to become a resident power in the Indian Ocean and beyond, just as Britain, France and the US became resident powers in the 19th and 20th centuries.

As partnerships and allegiances among states shift, new strategic balances, new institutions and new norms will emerge. Pressure will grow to reform old institutions such as the United Nations, the World Health Organization and the World Trade Organization, and to form new ones.

The US leads an informal ‘Quad Plus’ group to coordinate responses to the pandemic. It includes India, Japan, Australia, Vietnam, South Korea and New Zealand. The G7 is likely to turn into a D10—a concert of 10 democracies. The BRICS grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa might fall apart and be replaced by a Pakistan–Russia–Iran–China axis.

The world will be very different after the pandemic. The days of ‘Chimerica’, ‘responsible stakeholder’, ‘Chindia’, ‘South–South Cooperation,’ ‘Asian century’, ‘Asia for Asians’, and unregulated globalisation are over. With Cold War 2.0 intensifying, ‘Chindia’ and ‘Chimerica’ on a war footing and decoupling economically, the much-touted Pacific century will not be pacific, or Asian.

It may well turn out to be just another bloody century.

China considers joining trans-Pacific deal rejected by Trump

China is expressing an interest in joining the updated Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade agreement, which was originally designed as the centrepiece of the Obama administration’s ‘pivot to Asia’, intended to cement a non-Chinese Asian regional group.

China’s premier Li Keqiang told the National People’s Congress at the end of May that China had ‘a positive and open attitude’ towards signing the agreement. His comments were repeated later by commerce ministry spokesman Gao Feng, who noted that the agreement was consistent with World Trade Organization rules.

After US President Donald Trump made good on his 2016 election promise to withdraw from the TPP, Japan and Australia led a push for the remaining 11 members to conclude the deal, which was renamed the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, without the United States.

It’s difficult for non-Americans to understand what became a bipartisan US opposition to the TPP, given that US officials designed the agreement with the nation’s strategic interest and the priorities of its business sector uppermost in mind. Yet there’s a popular belief in the US that trade agreements are responsible for the erosion of its manufacturing industry and living standards.

The TPP was intended to be the world’s most advanced regional trade agreement, with provisions covering digital commerce, intellectual property protection, investment rights, environmental and labour standards and the transparency of state-owned enterprises.

Publicly, US officials said China would be welcome to join, but only if it could meet the TPP’s demanding standards. All members retained a right to veto any new member.

The inclusion of Vietnam among the remaining 11 members, alongside Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru and Singapore, shows it’s possible for a non-market economy to overcome the barriers to entry.

Following Trump’s withdrawal, the renegotiated agreement suspended a series of controversial provisions which the US had insisted on over the objections of other participants. They included much more stringent intellectual property protection for data, biological material, copyright and refinements of existing pharmaceuticals. Provisions making it easier for US oil companies to sue governments in independent jurisdictions were also suspended.

However, the new agreement still contains advanced intellectual property protections and includes safeguards for labour and environmental standards.

It also includes a far-reaching provision on state-owned enterprises, restricting them from receiving preferential financing and access to government contracts, and giving preferential treatment to local firms. Higher levels of transparency are required. Vietnam accepted these restraints, believing there was potential for large rewards from being the low-cost manufacturer in the group.

China’s economic reforms have continued under the leadership of Xi Jinping in some areas. There’s greater access for foreign investment, better regulation of the financial system and improved intellectual property protection, with the last reflecting the fact that China is now a major producer of patents. However, China has made little effort to impose greater market discipline on its state-owned enterprises.

China’s preferential treatment of SOEs has emerged as a major sticking point in its negotiations with the European Union over a bilateral investment agreement. A video meeting of Xi and Li with EU President Ursula von der Leyen last month went badly; no communiqué was issued afterwards and subsequent negotiations ended in a stalemate.

The EU is pushing for non-discriminatory treatment for European investments in China relative to China’s SOEs, along with an end to subsidies and greater transparency. It also wants to remove demands that investments take place through joint ventures and the forced transfer of technology.

China, for its part, wants guaranteed access for its companies to invest in Europe, including infrastructure. While Beijing has promised it will come back with reform proposals, the EU is hardening its stance on screening Chinese investment for national security reasons.

Under the leadership of Jiang Zemin in the 1990s, China used accession to the WTO as a lever to push through far-reaching economic reform in the face of considerable domestic opposition.

While Xi hasn’t shown a similar reformist zeal, China may surprise with reforms to SOEs to meet European demands and potentially those of the CPTPP. Beijing may feel a need to preserve its global trading and investment rights when Western governments are increasingly focused on the threats implicit in China’s rise.

Modelling by the respected Peterson Institute for International Economics shows there would be large economic gains if China joined the CPTPP. In its current form, the group should provide global income gains of just under US$150 billion a year. That would quadruple to US$632 billion if China were to join.

China would derive many advantages from joining the grouping, but one of the most important is that regional supply chains are secured by the mutual tariff cuts and the rules of origin which require goods benefiting from those cuts to have been made from inputs largely sourced within the region.

This is also a benefit that flows from the other major regional trade treaty that is expected to be concluded this year, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which includes Japan, South Korea, the 10 ASEAN nations, Australia and New Zealand. It reduces the US’s ability to disrupt the trade of high-tech goods with China.

The US is left looking on at these developments from the outside. The Trump administration has floated the idea of an ‘economic prosperity network’ that would include Australia, India, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea and Vietnam, with the objective of developing supply chains that exclude China.

However, it’s hard to conceive of such a trade grouping being cemented by an administration whose overriding objective is ‘America first’ and which has pursued its own bilateral trade agreement with China.

Trump’s rival in this year’s presidential election, Joe Biden, has said he would consider US participation in the CPTPP if its terms could be improved. China’s expression of interest provides an added incentive to do so.

What Japan’s U-turn on Aegis Ashore says about US alliance management

Without informing its US ally, Japan this week abruptly put on hold the planned deployment of two Aegis Ashore systems that were intended to bolster its defences against North Korean and Chinese missiles. Some commentators were quick to denounce the decision, arguing it would reduce Japan’s defence capability and strain the US–Japan alliance.

Not only are those risks overstated, but Tokyo’s action is also prudent for domestic, operational, strategic and alliance-management reasons. In fact, it’s crucial in what it says about Japan’s emerging response to a new strategic environment and the flawed approach to allied ‘burden-sharing’ under President Donald Trump.

Japan approved plans to purchase two Aegis Ashore systems at the end of 2017. A land-based version of the ship-based Aegis ballistic missile and air defence system, Aegis Ashore is capable of operating Standard Missile 3 and Standard Missile 6 interceptors.

The acquisition was seen by some analysts as a milestone in a more robust Japanese defence posture against North Korean and Chinese missile threats. Pyongyang’s launches in August and September 2017 of two nuclear-capable Hwasong-12 intermediate-range ballistic missiles over Japanese territory appeared to demonstrate the necessity for such systems. But the decision was also an attempt by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government to accommodate Trump’s pressure for greater burden-sharing in the early days of his administration.

However, since then the program has run into domestic problems. Severe local opposition to Aegis Ashore in Akita, in Japan’s north, led the Abe government to scrap plans to deploy it there last month. Yet, the second planned site in the southwestern prefecture of Yamaguchi had also already met with residents’ disapproval.

The program’s price tag has ballooned from an estimated US$2.15 billion in 2017 to more than US$4 billion. And Tokyo was reportedly not informed that it would have to pay for missiles launched in Hawaii to test the system’s radar. Finally, the Abe government says it only learned in May that significant technical modifications would be required to reduce the risk of the rocket booster falling into populated areas. Domestically, therefore, putting the Aegis Ashore procurement on ice ends a political liability for the Abe government.

It’s also sensible to forgo the Aegis Ashore deployment from a Japanese operational and strategic perspective. Despite what ballistic missile defence enthusiasts might claim, it’s a defensive, static land-based system whose effectiveness against a sophisticated missile threat from China or North Korea is highly questionable.

Japan’s expensive preoccupation with missile defence systems has already put a heavy burden on its navy’s Aegis destroyers, which nevertheless should still be able to cope with a potential North Korean attack.

But to better deal with the emerging military challenge from China, which is the real problem for Japan, its defence force would be far better off investing in more flexible offensive capabilities designed to complicate China’s (and North Korea’s) planning and operations, including mobile strike systems, hypersonic missiles, space assets and submarines. Rather than pursuing Aegis Ashore in a ‘sunk cost’ approach, the Japan Self-Defense Force could now reinvest the money in other, more urgent capability areas.

Japan’s decision also sends a clear message to the US about its position on future alliance relations. The Trump administration’s relentless insistence that Japan pay more for hosting US troops on its territory in exchange for protection is likely to have unintended consequences.

Tokyo has undoubtedly been watching Washington’s attempts to push both its South Korean and German allies around through blatant public threats about troop withdrawals if they don’t increase their defence spending. This approach is based on a fundamental misunderstanding: US allies, including Japan, are acutely aware that in the emerging strategic competition with China and Russia, America needs its allies more, not less. Repeated public US demands to ‘do more’ are no longer sufficient to persuade or even coerce allies, if they ever were.

Tokyo has learned by now that appeasing Trump through the purchase of expensive defence equipment such as Aegis Ashore and the F-35 fighter hasn’t worked. Instead, he has come back to ask for more.

But in this new strategic environment and in the context of upcoming negotiations with the US about Japan’s ‘host nation’ support, Tokyo is likely to take a harder line. The Aegis Ashore system could then be used as a bargaining chip for Tokyo in discussions about future burden-sharing within the alliance. Alternatively, Japan could offer its financial and technical cooperation to the US on other military systems of interest.

As the US will find out, pushing allies to ‘do more’ comes with a price tag as these nations become more inclined to push for greater autonomy about their defence decision-making, including on weapon systems. Japan is no exception. Indeed, Tokyo’s decision to cancel the Aegis Ashore acquisition for now without prior consultation with Washington is very much a case in point.

The messiah of Mar-a-Lago

US President Donald Trump says he is ‘the chosen one’, and many of his evangelical supporters agree. But standing, Bible in hand, in front of the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington DC, after the police used riot shields and tear gas to clear the area of peaceful protesters and journalists, Trump had more in common with Jesus Christ’s donkey than with a saviour. Far from liberating a fallen civilisation, Trump is pushing one to its breaking point, creating precisely the kind of mayhem that many of his evangelical supporters believe will precede—and necessitate—the arrival of a messiah.

Trump ran for president in 2016 on the promise to ‘make America great again’. His campaign for re-election in November pledges, with all the clueless arrogance we have come to expect, to ‘keep America great.’

Is this the same America that is facing widespread protests over systemic racism and police brutality, and in which the law-enforcement officers who are supposed to keep the peace are routinely stoking violence? The America where police kill black men at 2.5 times the rate of white men?

Is Trump referring to the America that is in the throes of the world’s worst Covid-19 outbreak, in which black people are dying at far higher rates than their white counterparts? The America where about 44 million people have no health insurance, and another 38 million have inadequate coverage? The one that, under Trump’s leadership, has lost the respect of its friends, allies and partners, and become an international laughingstock?

America’s problems did not begin with Trump. The US healthcare system has long been broken, inequality has been rising for decades, police brutality has always been part of American life, and systemic racism is built into the country’s very foundations. US pretensions of moral leadership were being called into question well before Trump entered the White House.

But if the United States was a tinderbox of racism, inequality and broken politics, Trump lit the match—and then held himself blameless for the resulting fires. ‘I don’t take responsibility at all’, he declared, when asked about the government’s slow response to the Covid-19 crisis.

Worse, Trump continued to add fuel. He downplayed the pandemic’s severity, egged on (mostly white, Republican) anti-lockdown protesters and touted unproven and potentially dangerous treatments.

When nationwide protests erupted after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, he threatened to deploy the military against Americans, prompting four-star general John Allen to warn that such a move could signal the ‘beginning of the end of the American experiment’. And, with a blatant racist dog whistle, he repeated a line attributed to Walter Headley, Miami’s police chief during the civil disorder there in 1967: ‘when the looting starts, the shooting starts’.

Trump’s behaviour has been shocking, but not surprising. He has been exploiting America’s deepest flaws since he arrived on the political scene, stoking political and cultural polarisation to appease his base, including its significant component of white supremacists. Meanwhile, he has maintained his grip on the Republican Party with a conventional combination of tax cuts and deregulation that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations.

And, for four years, his administration has shifted public money from the social safety net and education to the military. The US defence budget is now the largest it has been since World War II, barring a handful of years at the height of the Iraq War.

Why, one might reasonably ask, is Trump arming America to the teeth? After all, he has abdicated US global leadership and let China fill the vacuum without firing a single shot. Not only has he abandoned diplomatic norms, dismissed and betrayed allies, and bullied countries with sanctions and threats, he has also withdrawn from international agreements, including the Iran nuclear deal  and the Paris climate agreement.

For Europeans—who disagreed with Trump on most of these decisions—the US is no longer a source of strategic or moral leadership. It may not even be a fellow member of the transatlantic community. German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s recent rebuff of Trump’s invitation to a G7 summit over coronavirus concerns shows how far relations have fallen. Only desperate cynics like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, evangelical liars like Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, poseurs like British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and bullies like Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte still relish Trump’s friendship.

There is only one way to repair America’s reputation, regain the trust of allies and ensure that the US can act as an effective counterweight to China: address the root causes of the cracks that Trump’s disastrous presidency has exposed and widened. This is in line with the vision advanced in 2011 by two military strategists, Captain Wayne Porter and Colonel Mark Mykleby, using the pseudonym ‘Mr. Y.’

Porter and Mykleby argued that national security depends not only on the capacity to respond to threats from foreign powers, but also—and perhaps more important—on the ‘application of credible influence and strength’. That influence, in turn, depends on America’s success in providing a ‘pathway of promise’ for US citizens—and a model for the world.

Such soft power requires the US government to promote civilian values, foster competitiveness and innovation, protect the environment, invest in social services, healthcare, culture and education, and deliver opportunities to younger generations. In other words, it should be pursuing the opposite of Trump’s agenda.

Trump is the antithesis of the kind of leader that Max Weber believed should ‘be allowed to put his hand on the wheel of history’. A large and growing share of Americans seems to recognise this: the president’s approval rating has been declining for weeks. But a Trump victory in the November election remains a real possibility.

No one should have any illusions about the stakes. Winning another four-year term could embolden Trump to act even more irresponsibly, even criminally, and make his toxic legacy irreversible.

US primacy will survive Covid-19 and Trump

The conspicuous absence of American leadership during the pandemic has emboldened the narratives about the United States’ decline and the weakening of the international order. The result has been a proliferation of commentary on the reconfiguration of global power, and America’s diminished position.

The predictions range from the crisis reshaping the world order and ending the transatlantic relationship, to China becoming the world’s dominant geopolitical player.

Former US diplomat Kurt Campbell, in a Foreign Affairs piece co-authored with Rush Doshi, wrote that for the US, the coronavirus pandemic ‘could mark another Suez moment’. The explicit reference to the crisis of 1956 that signalled the end of Britain’s status as a global power was noted by media in both the US and the UK.

The common denominator of much of the commentary on the US’s decline is the undue weight given to the rhetoric and the policies of President Donald Trump’s administration, at the expense of consideration of the actual indices of global power and influence. Trump’s reluctance to rally the world under the auspices of US leadership may indeed damage the perception of America as the linchpin of the free world, yet there’s been little change to the primary structures of power upon which its global position rests. While America’s pre-eminence will likely withstand the current crisis, the negative repercussions for China may endure.

In the contest for supremacy in what is increasingly being characterised as a new cold war, China now faces a world in which its prospects for expanding its economic influence have been severely circumscribed. As a result of Beijing’s mishandling of the coronavirus outbreak and its penchant for weaponising its economic clout, an almost unanimous consensus has emerged across the developed world on the need to reduce dependency on China.

As former US State Department official Aaron Friedberg observed, ‘[T]he experience of finding themselves dependent in a dire emergency on an irresponsible, opportunistic, and potentially hostile power has clearly left an impression on democratic publics and politicians that will not soon fade.’

The political backlash, coupled with the impetus for domestic industries to diversify in order to manage supply-chain risks, will inhibit the capacity of states to deepen their ties with China. Given the pre-existing economic and technological disparity between the US and China, it’s far from certain how China will narrow the gap in a global climate if all the advanced industrial economies strive to moderate their ties with Beijing.

There’s been a tendency among observers to suggest that, since both Beijing and Washington have mismanaged the crisis, the global power and influence of both will diminish. Such parallels, however, erroneously assume an equivalence in the adaptability of democratic and authoritarian regimes. There’s a resiliency in democracies that’s not shared by autocratic forms of government. As the American public intellectual Walter Lippmann put it, ‘Democracies always have several governments in reserve, whereas autocracies only have one.’ The capacity of democracies to withstand crises is greater than that of autocracies. When a democracy faces a crisis, the entire system of government is not on the line, but rather the transient governing administration. In an autocracy there’s no such clear separation.

The Chinese Communist Party’s lack of transparency, its intransigence on dissent and its propensity to conceal failures and transgressions are the imperatives of a ruling party concerned with regime preservation and maintaining order. The defects of the CCP are enshrined in the state. If the party were to initiate reforms in favour of openness and transparency to re-establish its international credibility, it would risk the survival of CCP rule. And we know that the example of Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost in Russia hasn’t been lost on the Chinese leadership.

The Trump administration’s failures and missteps, on the other hand, end with the administration. The US possesses geopolitical, economic, technological and military advantages that are too well entrenched to be jeopardised by any occupant of the White House. Being the only major nation without great-power threats in its own hemisphere gives the US capabilities in force projection that no other power shares.

Economically, America’s per capita GDP is unsurpassed among the great powers, yet it’s also the only power that doesn’t face a demographic problem. The strength of its economy enables the US to outspend all other powers combined on defence, using no more than 4% of its GDP. That’s much less than the 15% to 7% spent from the 1950s to the late 1980s. It’s cheaper for the US to maintain military supremacy today than it was throughout the Cold War.

Despite Trump’s ‘America first’ approach, the global position of the US and its institutions remains intact. Throughout the Covid-19 crisis, it hasn’t been the People’s Bank of China that the central banks of the world have turned to for assistance, but rather the US Federal Reserve, which through swap lines and repo arrangements has again demonstrated how central America is to global stability. Today, the US is still the singular power with the wherewithal and force projection to defend its interests globally. Until that changes, America’s ‘Suez moment’ will still be a long way away.

American exceptionalism in the age of Trump

In my study of 14 presidents since 1945, Do morals matter?, I found that Americans want a moral foreign policy, but have been torn over what that means. Americans often see their country as exceptional because we define our identity not by ethnicity, but rather by ideas about a liberal vision of a society and way of life based on political, economic and cultural freedom. President Donald Trump’s administration has departed from that tradition.

Of course, American exceptionalism faced contradictions from the start. Despite the founders’ liberal rhetoric, the original sin of slavery was written into the US Constitution in a compromise that allowed northern and southern states to unite.

And Americans have always differed over how to express liberal values in foreign policy. American exceptionalism was sometimes an excuse for ignoring international law, invading other countries, and imposing governments on their people.

But American exceptionalism has also inspired liberal internationalist efforts for a world made freer and more peaceful through a system of international law and organisations that protects domestic liberty by moderating external threats. Trump has turned his back on both aspects of this tradition.

In his inaugural address Trump declared: ‘America First … We will seek friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world—but we do so with the understanding that it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first.’ He also said ‘We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it shine as an example.’ He had a good point: When the United States sets a good example, it can increase its ability to influence others.

There is also an interventionist and crusading tradition in American foreign policy. Woodrow Wilson sought a foreign policy that would make the world safe for democracy. John F. Kennedy called for Americans to make the world safe for diversity, but he sent 16,000 US troops to Vietnam, and that number grew to 565,000 under his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson. Likewise, George W. Bush justified America’s invasion and occupation of Iraq with a national security strategy that promoted freedom and democracy.

Indeed, since the end of the Cold War, the US has been involved in seven wars and military interventions. Yet, as Ronald Reagan put it in 1982, ‘regimes planted by bayonets do not take root’.

Avoiding such conflicts has been one of Trump’s more popular policies. He has limited the use of American force in Syria and wishes to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan by election day.

Protected by two oceans, and bordered by weaker neighbours, the US largely focused on westward expansion in the 19th century and tried to avoid entanglement in the global balance of power that was centred in Europe. By the beginning of the 20th century, however, America had become the world’s largest economy, and its intervention in World War I tipped the balance of power.

In the 1930s, popular American opinion held that intervention in Europe had been a mistake and turned inward towards strident isolationism. With World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt, his successor, Harry Truman, and others drew the lesson that the US could not afford to turn inward again. They realised that America’s very size had become a second source of exceptionalism. If the country with the largest economy did not take the lead in producing global public goods, no one else would.

The post-war presidents created a system of security alliances, multilateral institutions, and relatively open economic policies. Today, this ‘liberal international order’—the basic foundation of US foreign policy for 70 years—is being called into question by new powers such as China and a wave of populism within democracies.

Trump successfully tapped this mood in 2016 when he became the first presidential nominee of a major political party to call into question the post-1945 US-led international order, and disdain for its alliances and institutions has defined his presidency. Nonetheless, a recent poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs shows that more than two-thirds of Americans want an outward-oriented foreign policy.

The US popular mood is to avoid military interventions, but not to withdraw from alliances or multilateral cooperation. The American public is not about to return to the isolationism of the 1930s.

The real question Americans face is whether the US can successfully address both aspects of its exceptionalism: democracy promotion without bayonets and support for international institutions. Can we learn how to promote democratic values and human rights without military intervention and crusades, and at the same time help organise the rules and institutions needed for a new world of transnational threats such as climate change, pandemics, cyberattacks, terrorism and economic instability?

Right now, the US is failing on both fronts. Rather than taking a lead on enhancing international cooperation in the fight against Covid-19, the Trump administration is blaming China for the pandemic and threatening to withdraw from the World Health Organization.

China has much to answer for, but turning it into a political football in this year’s US presidential election campaign is domestic politics, not foreign policy. We are not finished with the pandemic, and Covid-19 will not be the last one.

In addition, China and the US produce 40% of the greenhouse gases that threaten humanity’s future. Yet neither country can solve these new national security threats alone. As the world’s two largest economies, the US and China are condemned to a relationship that must combine competition and cooperation. For the US, exceptionalism now includes working with the Chinese to help produce global public goods, while also defending values such as human rights.

Those are the moral questions Americans should debate ahead of the presidential election.

Is the F-35 a poster child for a pre-pandemic paradigm?

There’s a big international weapons program that probably doesn’t pass the post-coronavirus pub test for supply chain security. As US President Donald Trump’s recently said, ‘It’s a certain fighter jet, I won’t tell you which, but it happens to be the F-35.’

Trump’s musings about making all components for the F-35 in the United States might have been only a thought bubble, but they also brutally revealed the internal contradiction at the heart of calls to mitigate supply-chain vulnerabilities by bringing production back on shore: one person’s local manufacture is another’s loss of export markets and workshare.

There are a couple of reasons why Trump’s idea of stripping the seven remaining non-US partners in the joint strike fighter consortium (Australia, Canada, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway and the United Kingdom) of their workshares likely won’t happen. The first is that finding new suppliers for literally thousands of components will inevitably delay the program even further. Replacements for all of the components made by Turkey still haven’t been found, even though the program has had a year and a half to work through the consequences of ejecting Turkey.

The second is that it would be an act of perfidy that would be hard for America’s allies to ignore. The other six consortium members are in NATO, which has already been buffeted by Trump’s treatment of allies. Those six have been in for the long haul, literally paying their consortium dues in the expectation of significant workshares. They are anticipating a substantial return on that commitment with production ramping up now. Plus, they have expectations of feeding parts into the sustainment supply for the next 40 years.

The Europeans generally have much higher expectations of industrial offsets than Australia does, so they would be outraged if Trump’s idea became a reality. They might even think of leaving the program and buying a different aircraft. But Trump has them over a barrel—the UK and Italy need the F-35B short take-off and vertical-landing variant for their aircraft carriers and there’s nothing else on the market. Those who are buying the conventional F-35A variant could look to the Eurofighter or something else, but their F-35 deliveries have already begun so there’s a huge sunk cost in changing course.

Australia’s workshare is also at stake. Let’s put aside the fact that there’s no public evidence for the widely repeated figure of 5,000 Australian jobs in the F-35 supply chain. That would be about the same number of jobs as will be directly involved in building the future frigates and submarines, so it also doesn’t pass the pub test. Independent analysis suggests 1,000 is a more reasonable number. Nevertheless, there is a principle here, not to mention contracts.

The allies’ sense of betrayal and the blow to US credibility should be enough to stop Trump going through with it.

But Covid-19 is forcing the world to challenge its assumptions, and that raises the question of whether you would design a program like this again. Deliberately scattering bits of manufacturing supply chains around the world goes against the post-Covid-19 wisdom of consolidating to ensure greater control.

The F-35 sustainment system also prevents participants from stockpiling their own spares for a crisis. All spares are owned and held by the program and are warehoused around the world. If you need them, you have to rely on a just-in-time model to deliver them—except the model doesn’t work anywhere near as well as we’ve come to expect from companies like Amazon, even in peacetime. So, you have to order your just-in-time spares two years in advance. The ‘autonomic logistics information system’ that is meant to understand and manage demand for spares is so clunky the US Department of Defense is junking it and starting over with a (hopefully) better one that doesn’t rely on 1990s software and is designed from the outset to operate in the cloud.

Australia will be a regional repair and warehousing hub in the current JSF model; hopefully Defence has done its due diligence to test whether that model with withstand the demands of wartime use. Nevertheless, Australia still can’t own and stockpile its own spares even if it wants to spend the money.

But more than this, there’s the sheer size and complexity of the program. Granted the aircraft is now more or less doing what it’s meant to do and is delivering unmatched capability. But the amount of developmental technology involved, the level of systems integration, and the amount of software to make it all work has also meant long delays, huge cost increases and a lack of agility.

The program has been going for 19 years and still hasn’t received sign-off to start full-rate production. Those delays mean it’s hard to plan transitions and legacy platforms stay in service longer. It also means you don’t enjoy the benefits of that unmatched capability for as long as adversaries have time to develop counter-technologies. The complexity means that individual consortium members can’t simply develop the upgrades they need, which is why Australia is still waiting for its priority capability—an integrated long-range maritime strike weapon. It also means sustainment costs are nowhere near the original aim of being comparable to those of the aircraft being replaced.

In contrast to the JSF behemoth, look at the little country that could. Sweden, with less than half the population of Australia, is one of the few countries left in the world that can design and build fighter planes (and submarines, warships, missiles and armoured vehicles, for that matter). There are only around 250 of Sweden’s Gripen fighter in the world compared with the more than 3,000 planned F-35s, but it still seems to be cost-effective to make them.

This isn’t to say we should abandon the JSF program and buy Gripens. But it does suggest we also should be exploring other models to develop and acquire military capability. Models that can deliver ‘good enough’ capability faster, that we can evolve ourselves to meet our priorities, and that we can support, repair and upgrade in a crisis are worth taking a look at in the post-Covid-19 world.