Tag Archive for: US Foreign Policy

Donald Trump and the decline of US soft power

The evidence is clear. Donald Trump’s presidency has eroded America’s soft power. Only 30% of people recently polled by Gallup in 134 countries held a favourable view of the United States under Trump’s leadership, a drop of almost 20 points since Barack Obama’s presidency. The Pew Research Center found that China, with 30% approval ratings, had reached near-parity with the US. And a British index, The Soft Power 30, showed America slipping from first place in 2016 to third place last year.

Trump’s defenders reply that soft power does not matter. Trump’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, proclaimed a ‘hard power budget’ as he slashed funds for the State Department and the US Agency for International Development by 30%. For promoters of ‘America First’, what the rest of the world thinks ranks second. Are they right?

Soft power rests on attraction rather than coercion or payment. It co-opts people rather than coerces them. At the personal level, wise parents know that their power will be greater and will last longer if they model sound ethical values for their children, rather than relying only on spankings, allowances or taking away the car keys.

Similarly, political leaders have long understood the power that comes from being able to set the agenda and determine the framework of a debate. If I can get you to want to do what I want, then I do not have to force you to do what you do not want. If the US represents values that others want to follow, it can economise on sticks and carrots. Added to hard power, attraction can be a force multiplier.

A country’s soft power comes primarily from three sources: its culture (when it is attractive to others), its political values such as democracy and human rights (when it lives up to them), and its policies (when they are seen as legitimate because they are framed with some humility and awareness of others’ interests). How a government behaves at home (for example, protecting a free press), in international institutions (consulting others and multilateralism) and in foreign policy (promoting development and human rights) can affect others by the influence of its example. In all of these areas, Trump has reversed attractive American policies.

Fortunately, America is more than either Trump or the government. Unlike hard-power assets (such as armed forces), many soft-power resources are separate from the government and are only partly responsive to its purposes. In a liberal society, government cannot control the culture. Indeed, the absence of official cultural policies can itself be a source of attraction. Hollywood movies like The Post, which showcase independent women and press freedom, can attract others. So, too, can the charitable work of US foundations or the benefits of freedom of inquiry at American universities.

It is true that firms, universities, foundations, churches and other non-governmental groups develop soft power of their own which may reinforce or be at odds with official foreign policy goals. And all of these private sources of soft power are likely to become increasingly important in the global information age. That is all the more reason for governments to make sure that their own actions and policies create and reinforce rather than undercut and squander their soft power.

Domestic or foreign policies that appear hypocritical, arrogant, indifferent to others’ views, or based on a narrow conception of national interests can undermine soft power. For example, the steep decline in the attractiveness of the US in opinion polls conducted after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a reaction to the Bush administration and its policies, rather than to the US generally.

The Iraq War was not the first government policy that made the US unpopular. In the 1970s, many people around the world objected to the US war in Vietnam, and America’s global standing reflected the unpopularity of that policy. When the policy changed and the memories of the war receded, the US recovered much of its lost soft power. Similarly, in the aftermath of the Iraq War, the US managed to recover much of its soft power in most regions of the world (though less so in the Middle East).

Skeptics might still argue that the rise and fall of American soft power does not matter much, because countries cooperate out of self-interest. But this argument misses a crucial point: cooperation is a matter of degree, and the degree is affected by attraction or repulsion. Moreover, the effects of a country’s soft power extend to non-state actors—for example, by aiding or impeding recruitment by terrorist organisations. In an information age, success depends not only on whose army wins, but also on whose story wins.

One of the greatest sources of America’s soft power is the openness of its democratic processes. Even when mistaken policies reduce its attractiveness, America’s ability to criticise and correct its mistakes makes it attractive to others at a deeper level. When protesters overseas were marching against the Vietnam War, they often sang ‘We Shall Overcome’, the anthem of the US civil rights movement.

America, too, will almost certainly overcome. Given past experience, there is every reason to hope that the US will recover its soft power after Trump.

The US–Pakistan–China nexus

On 19 January, Defense Secretary James Mattis released an unclassified summary of the Congress-mandated US national defence strategy. In this administration’s outlook, the US military faces five major security challenges: China, Russia, North Korea, Iran and terrorists. The first two are elevated above the other three across the conflict spectrum because both China and Russia are ‘revisionist powers’ bent on ‘undermining the international order from within’. In particular, the top threat, China, ‘is leveraging military modernization, influence operations, and predatory economics to coerce neighboring countries to reorder the Indo-Pacific region to their advantage’ in pursuit of ‘Indo-Pacific regional hegemony in the near-term’.

It’s not clear that American strategists have grasped how the first and fifth threats intersect in Afghanistan—which now has become America’s longest war ever. Worse, it’s a war that’s being lost. But even President Donald Trump, with his penchant for straight-talking—not always accurate, but always entertaining—has retreated from labelling Afghanistan a costly failure and the pursuit of victory there a mirage.

In characteristically blunt language, Trump seems to have intuited the truth that the epicentre of the war—and where it has been lost—is not Afghanistan but Pakistan. On 1 January, in his first tweet of 2018, Trump vented that the US has ‘foolishly’ given Pakistan more than $33 billion in aid over 15 years, ‘and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools. They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan … No more!’ Pakistan reacted angrily, accusing Trump of being bitter for the defeat in Afghanistan. But Afghanistan’s former president Hamid Karzai welcomed the tweet for vindicating the argument that the war on terror had to be prosecuted by bombing not Afghan villages but ‘sanctuaries beyond Afghanistan’.

It’s hard to dispute that support from the Pakistani ‘deep state’ (or military-intelligence complex) for the shadowy Haqqani network and the Afghan Taliban has been responsible for most of the nearly 2,500 US soldiers killed in Afghanistan. Of course, Australia has skin in this game too. Since Trump’s tweet, Washington has suspended substantial security assistance to Pakistan.

A major difficulty in holding Pakistan to account for its two-faced duplicity is who to engage with: the civilian government or the military brass? The latter control security policy. Trump’s tweet also reopened a longstanding debate on the direction of influence between Islamabad and Washington. After 9/11, President George W. Bush told President General Pervez Musharraf to side with the US or be treated as an enemy. In word Musharraf became an ally, but in deed he continued to run with the terrorist hares while hunting with the American hound.

Islamabad’s duplicity became impossible to conceal with the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden in a highly visible fortified compound barely a stone’s throw from Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point. Speaking in Islamabad on 21 October 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton famously warned: ‘You can’t keep snakes in your backyard and expect them only to bite your neighbours. Eventually, those snakes are going to turn on whoever has them in their backyard.’

For all that, the Obama administration failed in its efforts to squeeze Pakistan into suspending support for the terrorist networks. Now some analysts believe Trump’s very volatility and unpredictability may force Pakistan’s generals to recalculate the costs of frustrating the world’s most powerful nation under a president committed to putting America first regardless of the costs to even the most steadfast allies in Europe, Asia and the Pacific.

Skeptics counter that Pakistan still controls critical supply routes for US troops in Afghanistan, that a collapse of Pakistan will risk a fusion of Islamic terrorism and nuclear threats, and that Islamabad has an alternative to the US in China. The Beijing–Islamabad bonhomie is popularly described in both countries as being ‘higher than the Himalayas, deeper than the deepest ocean, and sweeter than honey’.

The chokehold on supply routes has become less critical with the shrinking US military footprint in Afghanistan, while the China card may be exaggerated. For one thing, Beijing has nothing like Washington’s depth of influence in the international financial system and its institutions. For another, targeted sanctions on Pakistani officers will hit hard because almost every high-ranking officer has immediate family members living in the US, and ambitious students from elite families aspire to enrol in Harvard and Princeton, not Beijing and Tsinghua universities. And then there’s the growing international awareness of, and concern about, China’s predatory ‘debt-trap diplomacy’ that has curtailed, for example, Sri Lanka’s sovereignty over its Hambantota port.

Accordingly, Pakistan’s hitherto highly successful strategy of negotiating for continued US aid with a gun to its own head may have passed its use-by date. Meanwhile, a tweet-addicted president will instil the perception of a perfidious Pakistan deep into popular American culture, even as support for Pakistan has collapsed in the US media, think tanks and Congress.

To come back to the new US defence strategy, the China relationship has paid rich dividends to Pakistan vis-à-vis India. Among Westerners, only a few regional specialists realise that a primary motivation behind Beijing’s cultivation of Pakistan has been the policy of confining India’s power, influence and footprint to the subcontinent. The re-emergence of the quadrilateral security dialogue among Australia, India, Japan and the US will raise India’s profile as a consequential Asia–Pacific power. With the authoritative identification of China as the top US security threat and the Asia–Pacific as the primary theatre of strategic competition, the Beijing–Islamabad axis will add to the depth of Pakistan’s problems in its relations with Washington.

US–Vietnamese cooperation: current, not past, issues are the limiting factor

US defence secretary James Mattis recently made his first trip to Southeast Asia. Significantly, the visit took in Indonesia and Vietnam, both listed in Washington’s newly released national security strategy and national defence strategy as partners of growing significance. The trip not only marked the two nations’ greater role in the region, but also signalled that the US is putting increased weight on cooperation beyond the regional treaty allies, Thailand and the Philippines. Recognising that no relationship stays the same, but ‘they either get stronger or they get weaker’, Mattis confirmed that America wants a stronger relationship with a stronger Vietnam.

Hanoi has made active efforts from the early days of the US new administration to engage with it. Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc was the first Southeast Asian head of state—and the third from Asia (after Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe and Chinese president Xi Jinping)—to meet with President Donald Trump in Washington. Several more ministerial level visits have taken place and Trump visited Vietnam in November last year.

The idea of a US aircraft carrier visit was floated during the visit to Washington of Vietnamese defence minister Ngo Xuan Lich in August. In Hanoi, Mattis met briefly with President Tran Dai Quang, visited the historic Vietnamese Tran Quoc pagoda, and discussed plans for the USS Carl Vinson to arrive in Da Nang in March 2018. It will be the first such visit since US forces left Vietnam at the end of the war in 1975. Just two days before Mattis’s arrival, the US committed to dioxin remediation at Bien Hoa Air Base as it continued to address war legacies.

While the carrier’s arrival will have considerable symbolism—given the 50th anniversary of the Tet Offensive—the controversy it may well bring arises not from history but from current power plays in the region.

So how is this being viewed by China? A Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson was reported as saying that China had no objection to the Carl Vinson’s visit to Vietnam, but the Communist Party–run Global Times called the plan a ‘red line’ that neither the US nor Vietnam should cross. Beijing would see an aircraft carrier visit as meddling in South China Sea disputes that it wants external actors, such as the US, to stay away from. China’s dissatisfaction with the Washington–Hanoi rapprochement isn’t surprising, as these developments come amid the tension that followed the release of the US national defence strategy that explicitly named China as a ‘strategic rival’.  Add to that the latest freedom of navigation operation (FONOP) by a US warship. On 17 January, the USS Hopper sailed near the Scarborough Shoal—the subject of an intense dispute between China and the Philippines after it was seized by China in 2012. China insists that the FONOP violated its sovereignty and says the patrols have forced it to strengthen its defence capabilities, including establishing military facilities on artificial islands. Vietnam has been actively and consistently upholding its own claims in the South China Sea. Mattis’s visit to Southeast Asian countries, and in particular his commitment to closer cooperation with Hanoi, agitated Beijing further.

Vietnam is a sovereign nation that’s entitled to pursue independent foreign and defence policies. But China has been cultivating a habit of signalling what it expects from its neighbours, and what it doesn’t want. Beijing regularly tells countries, such as Vietnam, that they’re overreacting, and the southern neighbour is by no means singled out. In the growing debate on China’s coercive diplomacy, it’s important to appreciate that its rhetoric—expressing displeasure, disappointment or hurt feelings—is an integral part of Beijing’s strategy. Such rhetoric is often applied before, or often instead of, coercive action. For China’s purposes, conveying its displeasure is often enough to alter the target nation’s behaviour.

To stand up to Beijing, Vietnam needs to be sure of strong and continuing US support. Hanoi has developed a pattern of tailored reaction and a relatively good sense of when to give in and when to counter-coerce. For example, in May 2014, when China deployed the HYSY-981 oil rig into waters Vietnam claims around the Paracel Islands, the Vietnamese launched a concentrated diplomatic and media campaign to counter Chinese coercion. It resulted, eventually, in China withdrawing the rig ahead of schedule. In July 2017, however, under Chinese pressure to stop gas exploration in cooperation with the Repsol company, Hanoi bowed to Beijing’s demand. Of course, the reaction in each situation will depend on the severity of the issue and other factors such as the likely gains from concessions or the costs of countering Beijing’s coercion. Vietnam views the American aircraft carrier visit as an opportunity worth standing up to China over, but some room for negotiation remains, perhaps regarding the timing of the visit, the length of the carrier’s stay and what Hanoi says about its significance while it’s there. To put its foot down, however, Hanoi needs Washington’s continual reassurance that Mattis’s tougher stance towards China isn’t temporary and that a US commitment to the South China Sea remains on Trump’s priority list.

Sanctions relief, not more sanctions, may be the best way to promote reform in Iran

US President Donald Trump’s decision to grant sanctions relief to Iran on 12 January may have reflected a US need to buy time to build support for its position on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). But the decision may also point to an alternative way to promote genuine reform in Iran.

The late-2017 demonstrations across Iran—the most significant in the country since the 2009 protests against then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—arose primarily from widespread disillusionment with Iran’s dire economic situation and President Hassan Rouhani’s inability to deliver meaningful economic reform.

The Iranian government has used the ongoing US sanctions—which it claims breach the JCPOA—to deflect blame for its continued economic mismanagement and inability to eliminate chronic corruption. In certain respects, Iran is justified in using that excuse. Trump’s position on the JCPOA has discouraged US companies from investing in Iran and has also made European companies nervous about doing business there.

In Rouhani, Iran has a president who appears broadly receptive to change and reform. He was returned to government in 2017 by a significant margin after having overseen the negotiation and implementation of the JCPOA. While some observers argue that he’s not actually the moderate political voice that he’s often portrayed as, his relatively restrained response to last year’s protests suggests that he’s understands the need for economic reform and an anti-corruption strategy in Iran.

After the JCPOA came into effect, Iran’s national economic performance improved: growth increased from –1.8% to over 4% in a year. But significant structural issues will prevent further gains and limit the extent to which improvements in national economic performance translate into better living standards across Iran.

Within Iran, the issue of renewed US sanctions distracts from the economic problems that Rouhani’s government needs to solve. More importantly, the US position on Iran and the JCPOA risks empowering hardline elements in Iran who oppose the agreement and who are quick to blame Rouhani for failing to deliver on promised economic improvements. It’s not surprising that some in Iran see the hand of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad behind the protests. Iran’s ongoing economic malaise feeds the hardliners’ narrative that engagement with the West isn’t in Iran’s interests and that Rouhani can’t improve the economy.

Similarly, the US response to the December 2017 protests, which included a push for new sanctions, led to more claims from Islamabad that Washington was meddling in Iran’s internal affairs by inciting the protests. In this context, any new sanctions will be perceived as part of a US strategy to effect regime change in Iran rather than as a legitimate response to widespread violations of human rights.

Also worrying is the recent reporting that Germany is looking at imposing new European sanctions on Iran. That appears to be as much a concession to US pressure as a genuine response to Iran’s continued work on its ballistic missile program and its role in conflicts in Syria and Yemen.

But Trump’s decision to waive sanctions—particularly those related to Iranian banks—represents a more constructive approach that could encourage reformist processes in Iran. Trump’s decision on banks provides Rouhani with some critical breathing room, especially given that Iran’s banking sector is overleveraged and is one of the most vulnerable parts of its economy. A relaxation by the US of other comparable sanctions could result in other economic improvements in Iran. It would also be a rare demonstration of good faith on the part of the Trump administration, vindicating Rouhani’s support for the JCPOA and potentially empowering reformists within Iran.

Admittedly, any positive reaction to the US sanctions waiver was undermined by the introduction of new sanctions targeting the Iranian military and regime figures involved in human rights abuses—but that’s more a problem of optics than of economics. More concerning are continued indications that the US under Trump not only remains hell-bent on picking a fight with Iran over the JCPOA, Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs, and its role in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, but is also looking for ways to exploit the recent protests to promote regime change in Iran.

If regime change is gaining serious consideration in Washington, then Trump’s Iran policy could backfire spectacularly. Ignoring the risk a return to its pre-JCPOA nuclear activities, Iran is currently close to realising a number of its strategic goals in the Middle East. Iran has taken advantage of ISIL’s retreat in both Iraq and Syria. It’s also benefiting from a thaw in relations with both Qatar and Turkey.

Iran’s more secure strategic position may mean that it can test the Trump administration’s resolve on the JCPOA and capacity to protect US strategic interests in the Middle East. But Rouhani’s government is likely to remain under pressure because of Iran’s weak economy. Rather than seek to exploit this fissure to promote more protests, the US should see it as an opportunity to use sanctions relief as a tool to encourage positive economic and political change in Iran.

Leading the way on climate change: is it Australia’s turn?

Hard on the heels of increasingly warm years, harvest-destroying heatwaves, and multiple billion-dollar storms comes a frightening number: 407. That is the ambient concentration of CO2 as of July 2017, the highest it has ever been in human history.

Climate change is recognised as a security threat by nations and military forces all over the world. Hotter temperatures, more variable precipitation, rising sea levels, and more extreme weather events will result in the degradation of military forces and installations, new public health threats, and the displacement of record numbers of people. But just when we need a strong global regime to address this enemy-less threat, our chances of forming such a regime are dwindling for lack of a leader.

The United States has been the chief architect of the post–World War II liberal international order that relied on free trade and collective security to manage threats and ensure peace, but it is now divesting itself of that leadership role. President Donald Trump has indicated his dissatisfaction with NATO and his intention to withdraw the United States from NAFTA, the TPP and the Paris climate agreement.

If there was ever a security issue that required a collective approach to manage successfully, it’s this one! Such a collective security regime doesn’t necessarily need to be global, though the underlying climate problem certainly is. Even regional alliances and regimes that cooperate to manage the effects of climate change would provide a significant security benefit, in the form of both timely responses to shared threats and coherence between the national climate policies of participating states.

But climate regimes don’t magically appear out of thin air. If the US is exiting stage right, then another nation will have to step in and take the Americans’ place in guiding this regime to its desired operability. Lisa Friedman in the New York Times posited that, for various reasons, China, Canada, the EU, the United Nations, and US state and local governments aren’t well suited for the task. However, there’s one nation that has both the technological power and the stand-up reputation to do so. Why not Australia?

If size and power were the sole determining factors, China would seem to be the natural heir to the US in formulating international law. Australia, with 23 million people and a GDP of almost $1.2 trillion, isn’t the largest, richest or most powerful nation in the Asia–Pacific. However, it possesses something unique in the region: a willingness to articulate norms for the global good.

Australia has a deserved reputation as a good international player. It’s a party to almost every applicable international regime. And it accepts the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court (the United States does not) and has served on the UN Security Council five times, ending its most recent term in 2014.

Australia is also particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. The continent receives an average of less than 600 millimetres of rainfall a year, and prolonged droughts are already a serious problem. Increasing ambient air temperatures and changing precipitation will affect the nation’s food security. Sea-level rise and extreme weather events will threaten infrastructure and coastal populations. Wicked second-order problems like climate refugees, new threats to public health, and the completely foreseeable call for international peacekeeping troops and humanitarian aid will all affect Australia.

In international law, you can’t make the rules if you don’t sit at the table. In this case, Australia’s leading presence in forming a new Pacific climate regime would mean that it could help shape the regime to its own sense of justice. Want to embrace the principles of joint implementation and loss and damage? Write them into the founding documents. Think science policy should be based on actual science? Insist on an independent scientific advisory board vetting the information underlying any policies, and nominate people to sit on it.

Embracing norms of international cooperation, honest dealing, and policies based on science would be a welcome change at the upper levels of climate diplomacy, especially in the face of American abdication. And even nations that don’t formally join the regional regime will face pressure to abide by the norms of behaviour that the regime spells out—which seats Australia not only at the table, but at the head.

Why bother with the head of the table? In a word, power. By leading the formation of a new Pacific climate regime, Australia can raise its profile as a significant regional player and ensure that its national interests are looked after. The Australian Defence Force has already embraced the concept of climate change as a ‘significant and growing national security threat’, and the PM has indicated Australia’s willingness to commit to long-term partnerships in the Pacific. These other nations can and should look to Australia as they once looked to the United States—as a nation with a firm grasp on reality and its eye on a secure future of its own making.