Tag Archive for: US Foreign Policy

Fighting assumptions: how are we bookending the global war on terror?

‘There is a lot more at stake than you see in this image.’
— Helen Mirren as Colonel Katherine Powell in Eye in the Sky

The Pentagon investigation into the drone strike that killed 10 civilians, including seven children, from one family near Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul on 30 August was released earlier this month. The finding that the strike was an ‘honest mistake’ and ‘not a violation of law, including the law of war’ is a dismaying reminder that the most pressing lessons of the global war on terror are not the oft-cited strategic miscalculations and intelligence failures, but the moral ones.

While the report of the investigation is classified, the US Air Force inspector general tasked with investigating the strike, Lieutenant General Sami Said, provided a detailed explanation of the findings and his recommendations in a press briefing. The transcript reveals a damning picture of the reasoning that guided pre-strike assessments and justifications in its aftermath. How we deal with this legacy, especially the assumptions that drove it, impacts how we go forward in fighting terrorism. And here, images—what we allow ourselves to see—play an important part.

The strike’s target turned out to have no links to Islamic State Khorasan (IS-K). Zemerai Ahmadi was a long-time aid worker for a US organisation. He and two other adult family members were killed along with several children who had rushed out to greet him as he returned home.

US Central Command had ordered the strike based on ‘intelligence that the man was planning an imminent attack on the airport’ where US forces were rushing to conclude the evacuation after 13 US service members and 169 Afghan civilians were killed by an IS-K suicide bombing days earlier. In a press conference some days after the strike, amid reports of dead children, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, called it a ‘righteous, self-defense strike’, in line with established procedures. He noted that at least one of the dead was an IS-K ‘facilitator’. He and the head of US Central Command, General Kenneth McKenzie, later apologised, saying the intelligence at the time had left them confident that the strike would avert another attack.

As Said detailed, the intelligence turned out to have been misinterpreted under perceptions of an imminent threat, due to lack of nuance and context within the strike cell. The two critical pieces of ‘intelligence’ were Ahmadi’s white Toyota Corolla, a popular vehicle in Kabul, which was tracked in the mistaken belief that it was one spotted at a location associated with IS-K. The second was his exchange of a computer bag with a colleague, which was seen as indicative because the explosives used in the previous attack were believed to have been hidden in a computer bag. Approval of the self-defence strike then came after ‘the vehicle got within three kilometers [of the airport] and was perceived to contain explosives, and thus, an imminent threat to US forces’.

Despite the apologies, the official narrative focuses on procedural flaws, with little to no acknowledgement of moral responsibility. Cited are ‘execution errors … combined with confirmation bias and communication breakdowns’, with the ‘need to enhance situational awareness’ as a key recommendation.

Following the ‘self-defense’ classification, the rules of engagement under which the strike was carried out didn’t require the strike cell to consult up the chain of command; in rapidly evolving, ‘highly dynamic situations’, field commanders are authorised to make decisions based on events on the ground. This means the interpretation of intelligence wasn’t subject to outside scrutiny, which, according to Said, explains why the pre-strike assessment procedures for determining the risk to civilians failed to detect the presence of children. An urgent CIA warning reportedly issued shortly before the strike indicated the likelihood of civilians being in the area and even the possibility that children were inside the vehicle.

Said did confirm that review of the video footage showed at least one child two minutes before the strike was launched, but he argued that the reviewers were ‘predisposed to looking for kids … You have to be like no kidding looking for it, but when you’re looking for it, certainly after the fact … there was evidence of a presence’. The inferences of his explanation—that the pre-strike assessment isn’t predisposed to look for children—are as nonsensical as they are painful, revealing a moral vacuum behind the way decisions were made and justified.

Pointing to the mental shortcuts of the strike cell in a fog-of-war context, with reference to the limits of human cognitive capacity, neglects the role of the interpretive frames or mental models through which we filter and make sense of information. The concept of confirmation bias is defined as a deliberate search for data compatible with the beliefs one already holds. We tend to prioritise what our mental models suggest is likely to be true, as opposed to actively trying to refute assumptions; missing information gets filled in based on associations that easily come to mind. And the motivational drivers behind decision-making go beyond mere cognitive mechanisms; they have as much to do with beliefs, assumptions and worldviews. This way, we see problems through narrow frames.

It has been observed that ‘in the scope and consequences of its policy-shaping impact, the War on Terror may be the most important frame in recent memory’. The moral logic behind it, set in motion by an act defined as war, enshrined an order justified by restorative violence. President Biden’s remarks on the end of the war in Afghanistan are clear:

To those who wish America harm, to those that engage in terrorism against us and our allies, know this: The United States will never rest. We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down to the ends of the Earth, and … you will pay the ultimate price.

The findings of the Pentagon report reflect this logic: self-defence, however loosely defined, still provides the moral legitimation to set flexible standards for designating and killing ‘enemies’. The war on terror seems bookended by the exact same assumptions it began with.

Our road out of the post-9/11 era, with its ethical and political dilemmas, runs alongside many other roads—in places like Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq, or across Africa and Asia—with death tolls that would tell of intense suffering, if much of it wasn’t actually untold, explained away, or worse even, not counted.

If we believe that frames determine what we see, the questions we ask, the answers we’re satisfied with, then we had better make sure our window on the world is big enough. Ahmadi’s family recounts how he pulled up to the house in his car and honked. His 11-year-old son ran out, and Ahmadi let the boy get in and drive the car into the driveway while the other kids ran out to watch. That’s when the missile hit the car, killing Ahmadi, seven children, an adult son and a nephew of Ahmadi.

‘That was my last memory, the sound of his horn,’ said Ahmadi’s brother Romal, who was inside the house. His three children, aged two to seven, were killed. Zemerai and Romal Ahmadi, another brother and the nephew who was killed had applied for special visas to the US, fearing reprisals from the Taliban since some family members had also worked for the US military.

Former US defence secretary James Schlesinger wrote in a 1992 article titled ‘Quest for a post-Cold War foreign policy’ that, ‘without goalposts, our policies will be determined by impulse and image’. Let’s make sure we fight our assumptions so that our window is big enough to allow us to see the full image, to count what matters and—most of all—those who matter, and to ensure that these insights are reflected in our policies.

Can American democracy and soft power be restored?

At a recent meeting of trans-Atlantic foreign policy experts, a European friend told the group that he used to worry about a decline in American hard power but felt reassured. On the other hand, he now worried more about what was happening internally and how that would affect the soft power that underlies American foreign policy. Are his fears justified?

Smart political leaders have long understood that values can create power. If I can attract you and persuade you to want what I want, then I don’t have to force you or pay you to do what I want. If the United States (or any country) represents values that others find attractive, it can economise on sticks and carrots. US soft power rests partly on American culture and foreign policies when they are attractive to others; but it also rests on our values and how we practise democracy at home.

As international polls show, President Donald Trump’s term in office wasn’t kind to American soft power. This was partly a reaction to Trump’s nativist foreign policy, which shunned allies and multilateral institutions, as well as to his administration’s incompetent response to the Covid-19 pandemic. But even more damaging to US soft power was Trump’s effort to disrupt the orderly transition of political power after he lost the 2020 election. And on 6 January 2021, as Republican Senator Ben Sasse described the invasion of the US Capitol, ‘the world’s greatest symbol of self-government … was ransacked while the leader of the free world cowered behind his keyboard—tweeting against his Vice President for fulfilling the duties of his oath to the Constitution’.

America’s allies and other countries were shocked, and America’s attractiveness was diminished. Can US soft power recover?

It wouldn’t be the first time. The US has serious problems, but it also has a capacity for resilience and reform that has rescued it in the past. In the 1960s, America’s legacy of racism fuelled major urban riots, and protests against the Vietnam War grew increasingly violent. Bombs exploded in universities and government buildings. The National Guard killed student protesters at Kent State University. We witnessed the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and two Kennedys. Populist demagogues like George Wallace fanned the flames of hate. Yet, within a decade, Congress enacted a series of political reforms, and the honesty of Gerald Ford, the human rights policies of Jimmy Carter and the optimism of Ronald Reagan helped restore America’s attractiveness.

Moreover, even when protesters marched through the world’s streets condemning American policies in Vietnam, they were more likely to sing ‘We Shall Overcome’ than the ‘Internationale’. The anthem of the civil rights movement illustrated that America’s power to attract rested not on its government’s policy but in large part on its civil society and its capacity for self-criticism and reform.

Unlike hard-power assets (such as armed forces), many soft-power resources are separate from the government and attract others despite politics. Hollywood movies and popular music showcasing independent women or empowered minorities can attract others. So, too, does America’s diverse and free press, the charitable work of its foundations and the freedom of inquiry at its universities. America’s firms, universities, foundations, churches and protest movements develop soft power of their own, which may reinforce others’ views of the country.

But while peaceful protests can generate soft power, the mob in and around the Capitol on 6 January was far from peaceful. The events of that day were a disturbing illustration of the way that Trump exacerbated political polarisation, which he continues to do by making his myth of a stolen election a litmus test in the Republican Party.

To be sure, the US had experienced an increase in political polarisation well before Trump was elected in 2016. His innovation was to exploit and exacerbate nativist populism as a political weapon to take control of the GOP, cowing congressional Republicans with threats of a primary challenge from his supporters. Many still are too scared to oppose his lies about the 2020 election. Fortunately, in a federal system, many state officials and legislators stood up to Trump’s efforts to intimidate them into ‘finding’ votes. Some pessimists worry whether this can continue.

For those who are mourning the demise of American democracy, it’s important to remember that unprecedented turnout in the 2020 election unseated a demagogue. And the outcome was upheld in more than 60 court cases overseen by an independent judiciary, including some of Trump’s appointees. And the outcome was finally certified by Congress.

This doesn’t mean that all is well with American democracy. The Trump presidency eroded a range of democratic norms. Polarisation persists, and most Republicans say they believe his lies about the election. Social media business models exacerbate the existing polarisation by relying on algorithms that profit from eliciting user ‘engagement’, and companies like Facebook and Google, under pressure from public opinion and congressional hearings, are only slowly beginning to respond.

At the same time, American culture still has sources of resilience that pessimists in the past have underestimated. Press freedom, independent courts and the right to peaceful protest are among the greatest sources of America’s soft power. Even when mistaken government policies reduce America’s attractiveness, its capacity for self-reflection and self-correction makes it attractive to others at a deeper level. As I told my sceptical European friend, values change with generations, and the younger generation is a source of hope.

Colin Powell’s American life

Colin Powell, former US national security adviser, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and secretary of state, who died this week at the age of 84, was a quintessential American, the son of immigrants. He was forever upbeat, someone who advised ‘not to take counsel of your fears or naysayers’ and that ‘perpetual optimism is a force multiplier’.

All of us are framed by our experiences early in life, and Powell was no exception. For him, it was the Vietnam War, where he served two tours as a young army officer. He became acutely aware of how poor policy and leadership could cost lives and destroy institutions, and came away wary of global abstractions thought up in Washington and implemented halfway around the world. With his direct military experience, war for Powell was never less than real.

Powell’s experience in Vietnam profoundly influenced his thinking as a policymaker. This was reflected in the ‘Powell doctrine’, which established criteria to be considered before military force is used. It was a plea to employ military force carefully, if at all. War for Powell was a last resort. Articulated in the aftermath of the classic, battlefield-oriented Gulf War and amid debates over less traditional interventions in the Balkans and Somalia, the Powell doctrine called for pointed questions to be asked and answered.

Are there important, clear-cut objectives that military force can best accomplish? Would likely benefits exceed expected costs? How would the initial use of military force change the situation and what would follow?

It was this last question that triggered his reference, in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War, to the ‘Pottery Barn’ rule: if you break it, you own it. Powell understood that the measure of an intervention was not how it began but how it ended.

I worked closely with Powell when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and I worked for the National Security Council under President George H.W. Bush, and again when he was secretary of state and I headed his policy planning staff under President George W. Bush. (Powell also was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations for 35 years and served on its board from 2006 to 2016.) He was particularly uneasy with limited uses of force to signal to adversaries, rather than significant uses of force to overwhelm them. This led him to embrace the 1990–91 Gulf War only after the first president Bush gave him the troops and equipment he asked for. The same set of questions led Powell to advise against going on to Baghdad in 1991 and to be wary of going to war against Iraq a decade later under the second president Bush.

Did Powell always get it right? Of course not. The biggest blemish on his record was his appearance as secretary of state before the United Nations Security Council in February 2003 to make the case for military intervention in Iraq. As we now know, what Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, was hiding from international inspectors was not weapons of mass destruction but the fact that he had none.

The process that led up to Powell’s UN statement is instructive. Given a script that Vice President Dick Cheney’s office had prepared just days before, Powell insisted that the intelligence community scrutinise and validate every word. In the end, more than 90% of the initial draft was changed or eliminated. Powell made clear he would deliver only remarks informed by what the government knew and, given the inherent uncertainty of much intelligence, what it judged to be correct.

We know now the statement was in part inaccurate, owing to what is known as confirmation bias. Assuming that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD, intelligence analysts and policymakers tended to devote the most attention to information that appeared to confirm their premise and discount information that did not.

What most of the critics miss is that Powell went to great lengths to establish the truth and that what he said was what he thought to be true. One can be wrong without malign intent. Moreover, it would be misreading history to hold Powell responsible for the costly, ill-advised war that followed. Alone among George W. Bush’s senior advisers, he did not push for it, and, as subsequent events showed, Bush was prepared to go to war without much international support. At the end of the day, Powell’s efforts at the UN are not central to understanding why and how the United States went to war in 2003.

After leaving government, Powell spoke out against the illiberal drift that had come to characterise the Republican Party. He remained a man of moderation and character to the end. In this, he resembled several of his contemporaries, including Brent Scowcroft and George P. Shultz, both of whom have also recently passed away. Unfortunately for the US and the world, there are few in American public life today who can take their place.

The Afghan tragedy and the age of unpeace

The images of desperate Afghans scaling the perimeter fence at Kabul’s airport in an attempt to flee Taliban rule provide a heartbreaking record of our geopolitical moment. The brutal way in which the West’s former allies in Afghanistan are being left to their fate encapsulates the determination of US President Joe Biden’s administration to shed old international commitments as it embraces a new strategy.

There is much to criticise about the United States’ hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan, not least the lack of concern for the rights of Afghan women and girls, intelligence failures and the absence of planning. But underlying many of the critiques is an unshakeable nostalgia, even grief, at the passing of an era. The US-led intervention in Afghanistan that began 20 years ago was the last vestige of a different world, defined by the quest for a liberal international order and the stated mission of bringing democracy and the rule of law to far-flung regions. Many in the West who attack Biden’s policy are in fact upset about the return of brutal geopolitical competition.

To understand Biden’s decision, we need to grasp the essence of this new era. The same globalising forces that brought us together when the Western mission in Afghanistan began are now driving us apart. Global supply chains, mass migration and instantaneous information flows have accompanied soaring inequality, fuelling an epidemic of envy as people everywhere compare themselves to the world’s most privileged. These forces have helped foster a politics centred around grievances, identity and a backlash against internationalism, epitomised by former president Donald Trump but repeated in various guises around the world.

In this context, any US president must heed the domestic mood—a potent combination of ‘America first’ sentiment and widespread distrust of elites—favouring withdrawal from foreign entanglements. Americans want their government to re-establish control in the face of the impersonal forces of interdependence, and no longer accept spending blood and treasure on distant missions to stabilise the world when they feel that the home front is so beset with problems.

Biden faces a new world in which countries attack each other by weaponising the very things that connect them. In the last few decades, we removed walls and borders, and wove a worldwide web that links people and countries together. But great-power politics now resembles a loveless marriage: the partners loathe one another but are unable to get divorced. With no children or dog to use to hurt each other, vindictive geopolitical partners turn to trade, finance, migration, pandemics, climate change and the internet.

Such connectivity conflicts have become common. Some countries withhold access to trade, face masks, vaccines, global finance or minerals. Others resort to cyberattacks or disinformation, or weaponise cross-border refugee flows. These modern methods do not meet the textbook definition of war, but they are killing and affecting far more people than armed conflict.

Thus, the end of the ‘forever war’ in Afghanistan will not bring peace. The Taliban used their control of information to persuade their domestic enemies to surrender without fighting. The massive predicted migration flows from Afghanistan will provide a rich target for Belarus and other states that want to undermine Western democracies, with state-sponsored online trolls stoking fear and sowing division. At the same time, the US will try to re-establish its sway over Afghanistan by manipulating aid flows and access to the dollar.

This is not war as we knew it, but it is not peace, either. Rather, the world has entered an age of unpeace, or perpetual competition among powerful states, with the US–China rivalry at its core. The Biden administration claims that the new frontier of freedom lies less in the ungoverned spaces of Afghanistan than in control of the global economy, infrastructure, artificial intelligence and technology. It is Biden’s determination to make the US competitive in this new era that has stiffened his resolve to exit the previous one.

Biden’s next task is to build an alliance that can manage the age of unpeace. He has begun poorly. Many governments committed forces to Afghanistan in order to ingratiate themselves with the US, but justified their engagement to themselves and their citizens with reference to the universal values and liberal order that America claimed to support. They will not quickly forget such a rapid shift in US priorities or easily erase the images of American incompetence in Kabul.

America cannot lead in the future as it did when it was the world’s only superpower. It will need alliances that are based around the weapons of connectivity and less focused on military power. For European states, this is both an opportunity and a challenge. In Afghanistan, they outsourced their geostrategy to America and then ultimately lamented the loss of control that they so meekly accepted after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. They now need to learn to compete in the new arenas of conflict before they can work out how to cooperate effectively with the US and other allies.

The forever war is finally over. The age of unpeace has begun.

Who benefits from insecurity in Haiti?

The president of Haiti, Jovenel Moïse, was shot dead on 7 July by a team of commandos at his home in Port-au-Prince. The first lady, Martine Moïse, was wounded in the attack and is recovering in a Miami hospital. The bold operation was allegedly perpetrated by 26 Colombian mercenaries hired through a Florida-based security company and three Haitian-American individuals from the South Florida region. The timeline of events and the list of possible perpetrators remain murky, but let’s try to go over what we know so far.

Twenty-three of the 26 suspects of Colombian nationality have been arrested, as well as the three Haitian-Americans. Haitian authorities have publicly implicated one of them, Dr Christian Emmanuel Sanon, naming him as the leader of the coup. Haiti’s national police chief also noted that Sanon had arrived by private jet in Haiti in June with a plan to take over the presidency. Sanon recruited mercenaries as bodyguards from a Venezuelan security company based in Florida called CTU. The mercenaries came from Colombia and were trained for months in Haiti (since January, according to one of the individuals arrested), before being deployed for the coup. It’s unclear how much they knew about the purpose of the operation; one of the alleged perpetrators claimed that it was supposed to be about bringing Moïse in the middle of the night to the presidential office, where Sanon would take over the presidency.

Sanon was the first person one of the suspects called after being captured, according to a report in the Miami Herald.  However, before his arrest, Sanon apparently made contact with two other people whom Haitian authorities say may have been the ‘intellectual authors of the assassination’.

It’s not clear who these individuals are or who the true intellectual authors of the coup might be, but Haitian authorities have summoned businessmen and opposition leaders Jean Marie Vorbe, Dimitri Vorbe and Réginald Boulos, as well as former senators Steven Benoît and Youri Latortue, to provide evidence in the investigation. At the moment, the fingers seem to be pointed at the oligarchs in Haiti, the all-powerful ‘families’ running the main businesses in the country, some of whom may have felt threatened by Moïse’s policies.

A few important questions remain. First, the presidential bodyguards offered no resistance during the attack, and no bodyguard was harmed. That is definitely suspicious. The heads of three police units responsible for protecting Moïse have been placed on administrative leave and are being interrogated. It’s been reported that Dimitri Hérard, head of general security at Haiti’s National Palace, flew to Colombia in the months before the assassination.

Second, the squad was dressed in black outfits reportedly resembling the uniforms worn by officers of the US Drug Enforcement Administration and shouted ‘DEA’ when entering the premise. We’ve just learned that at least one of the Haitian-Americans arrested also worked as an informant for the DEA, which could be a coincidence. The role of American officials in this saga remains to be determined; Sanon claims that he was approached by people representing the US State and Justice departments who wanted to install him as president.

Finally, maybe the biggest question of all is who will replace Moïse as president until new elections can take place. The Haitian constitution is of no help in this regard. Only 10 elected officials remain in the country (all senators), after the dissolution of the parliament in 2020. Moïse had been ruling by decree since the parliament’s dissolution, which led to discontent from civil society and opposition parties. Normally, the head of the Haitian Supreme Court would take over, but Judge René Sylvestre died of Covid-19 complications last month. This leaves us with three main contenders vying for the position of power: the acting prime minister, Claude Joseph; the man who was slated to replace him, Ariel Henry; and the current head of the Senate, Joseph Lambert, who was voted provisional president by his fellow senators a few days ago.

This situation prompts many to turn to the common trope of chaos and insecurity in Haiti. Such a narrative has been mobilised in the past, by local and international actors, to legitimise forceful interventions in the country. The only other time a Haitian president was assassinated in office was in 1915 (President Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam). That led to a military intervention and occupation by the US until 1934, when President Woodrow Wilson sent US marines into Haiti. The legacy of the American occupation is still being felt in Haiti.

The current situation also echoes what happened in 2004 after the forced exile of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, orchestrated by the US, Canada and France, which led to the establishment of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti. The UN mission did stabilise the country, but there are legitimate questions about what its stabilisation efforts entailed. The UN has a terrible track record of human rights abuses in the country, including a string of sexual scandals and many cases of abuse of force. It also inadvertently introduced cholera in the country, killing between 10,000 and 30,000 people and infecting 10% of the population. Many in Haiti are wary of any foreign intervention by the UN or the US, and any honeymoon a new intervention is likely to have will probably be short-lived.

One of the contenders for the position of president, Claude Joseph, requested an ‘urgent’ deployment of US and UN troops to the country. For now, the US has only committed to ‘security and investigative assistance’ through a delegation of FBI and Department of Homeland Security officials. However, while the Biden administration hasn’t ruled out sending US troops to Haiti, it has called for a union of Haitian political leaders to sort out the situation. This seems like a wise decision. Many Haitians clearly have no appetite for another military intervention in the country. And many in Haiti had been asking for a transitional government to be put in place, even before the assassination of Moïse. This could be as perfect a moment as any to bring all the different political parties and factions of the country together before legitimate elections can be held.

US and Australia need to get asymmetrical—fast

Half a decade of intensifying asymmetrical action—targeted disinformation, malign foreign influence, cyberattacks, espionage, corruption and trade embargoes—have transformed Australia’s geopolitical atmosphere.

So far, Australia has been trying out a bunch of different responses. Foreign interference legislation, the Pacific step-up, a reinvigorated Quad, experiments in technological decoupling, scrutiny of university research collaboration with countries of concern and, most recently, Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s appeal to the G7 to strengthen the World Trade Organization dispute resolution mechanism, only to have China move first against Australia in that forum—all these efforts are currently in play.

The US has taken some similar actions. But how effective have they been in deterring malign actors?

First of all, it’s important to realise that the US and its allies are really just beginning their exploration of asymmetricality, argues John Schaus, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, where he specialises in Asia–Pacific security challenges.

‘We have to dust off thinking about these things. But more than dusting off, the world and the way we think about our alliance is different to 40 year ago. Russia, China and Iran are different than they were in 1986. And the tools available, like cyber and digital information, are completely different.  And we are still grappling with this.’

For Schaus, allied nations need to embrace the zeitgeist of asymmetric deterrence. ‘We assume adversaries will fight the same sort of war we are planning for. We’ve become an easy target both in attack and in deterrence.’

So, skills of non-military offensive and defensive action, which were once well honed on both sides of the Cold War, need to be reimagined in this much more complex age of hyper-digital interconnection, economic globalisation and financial interdependence. But conventional military forces need to be used in more surprising and creative ways too.

In terms of military doctrine, US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin has been using the phrase ‘integrated deterrence’. But what does it mean? Schaus says that the concept is still being fleshed out.

But he sees two important facets. ‘For Lloyd Austin, he’s asking himself how he can organise his department to work together to achieve deterrence effects in terms of the military and civilian components of Defense.’

‘The second element is how is the military deterrence going to be integrated into broader national-level deterrence efforts, led by the White House and State and using economic elements, diplomacy, and informational components—where Defense is in a supporting rather than lead role.’

Using non-military tools is a lot cheaper and less risky, but it also requires a lot more coordination with allies.

For example, in the case of wine sanctions, Schaus says, ‘Australia has been put into a grey-zone corner by China.’ But, he asks, ‘Why hasn’t the US stepped up to buy that wine?’ Doing so would have sent an immediate message that such actions are ineffectual from an intimidation and deterrence perspective.

Schaus goes on to explain that the hardest part is not military to military or foreign affairs. It’s really a legislative problem. ‘Congress would need to create flexible rules to allow things like rapid importation.’

He also worries that the US is actively handicapping itself on the political warfare front.

‘I think we are very good at playing against ourselves. If we look at how our media has been Balkanised, Russia has been very good at exploiting this vulnerability in the US in the last two presidential elections and China is getting better at it. We haven’t yet found a good way of responding domestically or deploying similar tools in their systems.’

We shouldn’t be mirroring the disinformation tactics of adversaries, Schaus says. Instead, we should remember that the most effective strategy that the West used in the Cold War when dealing with closed political systems was not spreading disinformation but actively looking to spread credible trustworthy information. This had a corrosive effect in the Soviet Union.

The best sources of good information are great journalism and independent academic research, both of which are manifestations of free and open societies, says Schaus. ‘We need to think harder about how we can get that into China.’ And given the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts at surveillance and control of Chinese diaspora, Chinese communities in the West also need to be a focus.

But the question remains, with many nations souping up their grey-zone capabilities and seemingly settling in for an era of mutual destabilisation, isn’t this development highly dangerous for all countries involved?

That is true, says Schaus. A globe full of weakened, badly governed states hardly enhances the security of any nation, and creates destructive feedback loops—especially at a time when the international community must deal with the shared existential crisis of climate change.

But asymmetric activities don’t have to be destabilising. They can be confidence building while also having deterrent qualities.

Nuclear arms control regimes are an excellent example of this duality, says Schaus. They are confidence building in that adversaries agree to rules to hold themselves accountable and to minimise risks of miscalculation. And they act in a deterrent way because each side knows about its respective weapon stockpiles and how and where it could use these weapons.

Schaus says, ‘There are things we could do today to get us closer to that—things in cyber, things in economic engagement—to re-establish what those rules might be.’

In addition, emerging capabilities like uncrewed air systems and sleeping water sensors ‘add to deterrence but are not necessarily provocative’.

The shared crisis of climate change might also provide real opportunities for geopolitical cooperation that are potentially stabilising, Shaus says. Examples might include creating global emissions standards or cooperating on deploying renewable technologies to emerging economic powers such as India that will have to decarbonise at a much quicker rate if we are to avoid the worst impacts of global heating.

But at the same time, says Schaus, the reverse could also apply. Absent cooperative mechanisms, you could see a scenario where countries could use climate change and energy transition in a purely  competitive way—for example, by attempting to increase influence by gaining monopolistic market access to developing countries, or creating supply-chain dependencies.

Schaus says he’s sure that people in the Biden administration are thinking very hard about some of this potential and that there are even more in the broader US foreign and security policy spheres advocating for these ideas. But, he adds, ‘The main issue I think will be bandwidth, if the administration can find the time and the resources to do this while confronting all the other challenges facing us.’

Biden time: The first 100 days

Joe Biden has been president of the United States for 100 days, less than 7% of the time he was elected to serve. Still, it’s not too soon to draw some tentative conclusions about the nature of his presidency.

Biden’s principal accomplishment to date is the expansion of the Covid-19 vaccine supply and the acceleration of domestic immunisation against the disease. Some 220 million doses have been administered in the US since Biden took office. There is more than enough supply to ensure that every adult can be vaccinated. The daily death toll from the disease has fallen from over 4,000 per day to well under 1,000. The economy is poised to take off, with some even worrying that it could overheat.

In these same 100 days, the basic themes of the Biden presidency, articulated in his 28 April address to Congress, have emerged: an emphasis on tackling domestic challenges, a vastly expanded role for the federal government in both stimulating the economy and in providing basic services and financial support for citizens, and a commitment to confront racism, modernise infrastructure, increase the country’s competitiveness, and combat climate change. There’s also a willingness to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy to pay for some of what these initiatives will cost. How much of this agenda can be realised remains to be seen; for now, comparisons between Biden and Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson are understandable but somewhat premature.

Much of what Biden has done or wants to do represents a sharp departure from his predecessor, Donald Trump, and is popular with many Americans. On immigration, however, Biden’s approach is proving otherwise. His messaging is seen by some as partly responsible for the surge in people trying to enter the US via its southern border. Meanwhile, ceilings on refugee admissions are too high for many Republicans and not high enough for many Democrats.

It’s on foreign policy, though, where the comparisons with Trump are the most interesting. At first glance, Biden could not be more different. He embraces multilateralism and has brought the US back into the World Health Organization and the Paris climate agreement. And his administration is working to reboot the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran that Trump unilaterally exited.

Biden has also restored traditional allies and alliances to a core position in US foreign policy. He has already hosted Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga in Washington and will make his first overseas trip to Europe in June for the G7 summit. No American troops will be withdrawn from Germany, something Trump had announced he would do. And the Biden administration has made human rights a centrepiece of its foreign policy, regularly criticising Russia and China, sanctioning Myanmar, and publishing a report that holds Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman responsible for the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

But there is more foreign-policy continuity between Biden and Trump than first meets the eye. Take Afghanistan, where the difference between them amounts to just over four months: Trump signed a pact with the Taliban that committed the US to withdraw all its military forces by 1 May; Biden has committed to do so by 11 September. Just as important, Biden echoed Trump’s insistence that the calendar, not local conditions, would determine the timing of the US military withdrawal.

There’s considerable continuity when it comes to policy towards China as well. One no longer hears calls for regime change, but the one high-level diplomatic contact between US and Chinese officials could hardly have been less diplomatic. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has kept tariffs and export controls in place, continued to send US warships to challenge China’s claims in the South China Sea, repeated the description of Chinese actions in Xinjiang as genocide, sanctioned Chinese officials and maintained high-level contacts with Taiwan.

As for trade, what’s consistent is the lack of initiative. Missing from an otherwise robust policy towards China is any sign that the US is reconsidering its unwillingness to join Asia–Pacific regional trade groupings. Instead, there is a continued commitment to ‘buy American’ along with talk about foreign policy for the middle class, an otherwise empty slogan that suggests trade will remain a low priority given how controversial it remains with many Americans.

Even on Covid-19, the Biden presidency has embraced something of an ‘America first’ approach when it comes to sharing (or, rather, refusing to share) American-produced vaccines with the rest of the world. This is belatedly changing, with a commitment to share an untapped supply of the AstraZeneca vaccine with others. But the shift is limited and the delay has provided strategic openings to China and Russia, slowed economic recovery around the world, increased hardship and given new variants of Covid-19 more opportunity to emerge and gain traction.

In short, while Trump is no longer in the Oval Office, Trumpism still looms large. His attacks on free trade and immigration, promotion of a narrow ‘America first’ view of the world, and bias towards retrenchment are now and for the foreseeable future part of the political fabric. The country remains polarised; Congress is nearly evenly divided. This leaves Biden limited room for manoeuvre as he seeks to promote democracy, conduct diplomacy and reinvigorate global institutions.

Like all American presidents, Biden still enjoys considerable power and influence. But, as his first 100 days have shown, the one thing American presidents cannot control is the context in which they operate.

Biden faces test on human rights

During Joe Biden’s long career in the US Senate, he established a record of supporting human rights as a goal of American foreign policy. Now, as president, Biden’s commitment in this area is being put to the test.

Foreign policy involves trade-offs among many issues, including security, economic interests and other values. But when it comes to human rights, trade-offs often give rise to charges of hypocrisy or cynicism.

Consider the 2018 killing of Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi at Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul. Former President Donald Trump was criticised for ignoring clear evidence of a brutal crime in order to maintain good relations with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, better known as MBS.

Liberals criticised Trump’s mild reaction to Khashoggi’s murder as remorselessly transactional and heedless of the facts. Even the conservative Wall Street Journal editorialised that ‘we are aware of no President, not even such ruthless pragmatists as Richard Nixon or Lyndon Johnson, who would have written a public statement like this without so much as a grace note about America’s abiding values and principles’.

Trump viewed access to oil, sales of military equipment and regional stability as paramount, but ignored that upholding values and principles that are attractive to others is also an important national interest. Defending human rights tells the world who Americans are and enhances America’s soft power, or the ability to get what one wants through attraction rather than coercion or payment.

Combining these different types of interests in foreign policy requires compromise, which gives rise to criticism over how the compromises are struck. During the 2020 campaign, Biden criticised Trump for turning a blind eye to MBS’s role in Khashoggi’s murder. Upon becoming president, he authorised the Director of National Intelligence to release a declassified report that assigned blame to MBS, banned 76 Saudi individuals from the United States, and curtailed the use of American weapons in the Saudi war in Yemen.

But liberal critics argued that Biden should have gone further and announced that the US wouldn’t deal with MBS, thereby pressuring King Salman to install another crown prince. Many experts on the kingdom argue that this sort of regime change was beyond America’s capability. Unlike Trump, Biden invoked American values, but raised questions about whether he struck the right balance.

Similar issues have arisen over Biden’s policy towards China. Biden criticised Chinese President Xi Jinping for not having ‘a democratic bone in his body’, and when Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan met with their Chinese counterparts in Anchorage, they criticised China’s human rights violations in Xinjiang and the repression of democracy and its defenders in Hong Kong. With regard to Russia, Biden agreed with a statement that President Vladimir Putin was ‘a killer’.

Yet when it came time to invite leaders to a US climate summit, Xi and Putin were on the list (though the Saudi invitation went to King Salman, not his son). Was this hypocrisy, or did it reflect a realistic assessment that climate change is a major threat that can’t be managed without the cooperation of these countries’ governments?

For example, China is now the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and Saudi Arabia sits on the largest pool of hydrocarbons. There can be no solution to our climate problem if they are not on board. We will have to learn the importance of exercising power with others as well as over others if we wish to deal with ecological interdependence. That means working with China on climate and pandemic issues even as we criticise its record on human rights.

How, then, can we decide whether our leaders make ‘the best moral choices’ under the circumstances? As I argue in my book Do morals matter? Presidents and foreign policy from FDR to Trump, we can start by making sure we judge them in terms of ‘three-dimensional ethics’ that considers intentions, means and consequences, and by drawing from three foreign-policy schools of thought: realism, liberalism and cosmopolitanism, in that order.

Human rights should not be framed as pitting values against US national interests, because values are part of America’s national interest. We should start with realism but not stop there. Within the realm of the possible, we should assert our values in the manner in which they are most likely to make a difference. At the same time, if we don’t start with realism, we will soon rediscover that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

The goals that US presidents have sought over the years do not reflect a pursuit of justice at the international level similar to what they aspired to at home. In the 1941 Atlantic Charter (one of the founding documents of the liberal international order), US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared their devotion to freedom from want and fear. But Roosevelt didn’t try to transfer his domestic New Deal to the international level. Even the renowned liberal philosopher John Rawls believed that the conditions for his theory of justice applied only to domestic society.

At the same time, Rawls argued that liberal societies have duties beyond their borders, including mutual aid and respect for institutions that ensure basic human rights while allowing people in a diverse world to determine their own affairs as much as possible. Thus, we should ask whether a leader’s goals include a vision that expresses widely attractive values at home and abroad, but prudently balances those values and assesses risks so that there’s a reasonable prospect of their success.

This means that we judge a leader based not only on his or her character and intentions, but also on contextual intelligence when it comes to promoting values. So far, Biden is passing that test.

Policy, Guns and Money: Hypersonic weapons, technology innovation, and US politics and foreign policy 

In this episode, ASPI senior analyst Marcus Hellyer speaks to ASPI senior fellow Andrew Davies about his recent report, Coming ready or not: hypersonic weapons. They discuss what hypersonic weapons are, whether there are ways to defend against them, and who is developing them.

Next, ASPI’s Teagan Westendorf speaks with Professor Lisa Short, founder of P&L Digital Edge and group chair of the Global Foundation for Cyber Studies and Research. They talk about how Australia can enable big tech innovation, the challenges of funding innovation, and why it’s important for decision-makers to have an understanding of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and of the potential of innovation.

Finally, Anastasia Kapetas, The Strategist’s national security editor, talks with Hayley Channer, senior policy fellow with the Perth USAsia Centre, about the relationship between US domestic politics and foreign policy, President Joe Biden’s response to Covid-19, and how the Biden administration can rebuild trust with its allies in the Indo-Pacific.

Vale George Shultz

The passing of former US Secretary of State George Shultz on 7 February, at the grand age of 100, was a sad moment for those of us who shared his passion for a world free of the horror of nuclear weapons.

A Republican who always put principle before partisanship, a military veteran and Cold War realist who never lost his idealistic hopes for a better world, a hugely competent statesman in multiple roles over many years, and a thoroughly decent human being, Shultz was the crucial voice in reinforcing President Ronald Reagan’s instinct—so movingly articulated in his joint statement with Mikhail Gorbachev at Reykjavik 35 years ago—that ‘a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought’.

It was Shultz who played the critical role in negotiating the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987, and in generating the momentum for the major drawdown of US and Soviet stockpiles that followed. And it was he who, along with his Democrat colleagues Bill Perry and Sam Nunn—and a slightly less enthusiastic Henry Kissinger—penned the famous series of Wall Street Journal opinion articles from 2007 onwards, arguing that ‘reliance on nuclear weapons for deterrence is becoming increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective’ and urging that the nuclear-armed states get serious about moving towards their elimination. It was a cause for which he campaigned, with slowly fading energy, but undimmed commitment, throughout the last decades of his life.

On a personal note, I came to know Shultz well during my years as Australian foreign minister and later president of the International Crisis Group, and liked and admired him immensely. His time as an officer with the US Marine Corps in the Pacific War gave him an abiding understanding of the region, and interest in and affection for Australia, and he was a close friend of Prime Minister Bob Hawke with whom he had first knocked about years before as a fellow delegate to International Labour Organization conferences in Geneva. I was a regular invitee to the annual off-the-record roundtables meetings he co-convened in the 1990s, from the Hoover Institute at Stanford, with former Democrat Senator Bill Bradley, bringing together a small group of young ministers from around the Asia–Pacific. On one particularly memorable evening, he and his wonderful wife Charlotte hosted a spectacular kangaroo, koala and vegemite-themed dinner at their home on the Stanford campus in honour of his ‘Aussie mate’.

George Shultz believed intensely, here as elsewhere, in ‘diplomatic gardening’—the immense importance of building personal relationships if global and regional problems were ever to be effectively cooperatively addressed. And he never lost sight of the issues that really mattered. There were plenty of political issues about which we disagreed, but never about the need to rid the world once and for all of the most indiscriminately inhumane weapons of war ever devised.

A giant’s voice has been stilled, and the world is poorer for his passing.