• Tag Archives Foreign Policy

  • US-Russia Tensions Are Escalating Because of Collusion Fever

    Posted on by Azrael Comment


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    Establishment media and politicians began to sound the alarm on fake news after Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, blaming deception and ignorance for his victory. But as much as they might worry about the spread of false narratives and disinformation, their thirst for stories about Russia colluding with then-candidate Trump during the 2016 election proved to be a powerful brand of fake news—one that has most certainly put lives at risk.

    In the aftermath of Trump’s victory, the “Russia hacked the election” narrative quickly became the gospel of the mainstream left. It was only a matter of time, they claimed, until the facts revealed the nefarious relationship between Trump and the Kremlin and exposed the flagrant collusion that led to Clinton’s defeat. There was just one problem: the outlets drumming up this narrative lacked evidence to substantiate it.

    In one instance, The Washington Post reported that Russia had penetrated the US electricity grid only to be forced to issue a correction admitting they had their information wrong. In another show of sensational Russiagate journalism, The Post published a story citing an anonymous group called PropOrNot claiming Russia had infiltrated alternative news outlets to spread Russian propaganda.

    After respected journalists like The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald and Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi roundly condemned the article’s betrayal of basic journalistic standards, the Post issued a tepid clarification two weeks later—after the story had already made its rounds as fact.

    A slew of sparsely substantiated speculations and stories has flooded the consciousness of millions of Americans since 2016. In another example, a story published by The New York Times claimed the CIA had proof Russia was behind Trump’s victory but cited nothing more than anonymous officials’ statements. As Greenwald observed at the time:

    Democrats — still eager to make sense of their election loss and to find causes for it other than themselves — immediately declared these anonymous claims about what the CIA believes to be true, and, with a somewhat sweet, religious-type faith, treated these anonymous assertions as proof of what they wanted to believe all along: that Vladimir Putin was rooting for Donald Trump to win and Hillary Clinton to lose and used nefarious means to ensure that outcome.

    Despite apt criticism like this, elaborate theories of Russia’s infiltration of American democracy spurred hysteria among Americans, politicians, and journalists who oppose Donald Trump’s presidency. This panic, in turn, has plunged America into Cold War 2.0 with Russia, which, as Hillary Clinton warned, puts “lives at risk” without producing evidence to remove Trump from power.

    Despite rampant, unverified narratives that the president worked hand-in-hand with Putin, the media’s ongoing claims of his traitorous activity at worst contributed to the president’s already hawkish policies—and at best failed to hold him accountable for them. As The Nation magazine noted last April,

    Democrats and much of the media … have incessantly demanded Trump “‘get tougher’” with Russia and its President Vladimir Putin in order to demonstrate that his election had not been abetted by “collusion with the Kremlin.”

    As the Russiagate narrative insisted Trump was Putin’s pawn, the president was actually heightening tensions with his alleged collaborators, playing a global game of chicken. On numerous occasions, US forces have been in direct opposition to—and exchanged gunfire with—Russian forces in Syria. Considering the left-leaning media’s ongoing demonization of Trump, from his dietary preferences to his mental health, challenging this aggressive foreign policy should have been low-hanging fruit.

    He campaigned on the promise of ending America’s longstanding policy of nation-building, a promise he has failed to keep with his ongoing bombings in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere which have killed record numbers of civilians. Despite his rhetoric indicating a withdrawal of troops from Syria, US troops remain stationed there. (This is, of course, not unique to Trump. It is par for the course in modern American politics: war is the health of the state.)

    Instead of seizing the opportunity to promote peace and discourage violent conflict, however, outlets chose to side with the jingoists. When Trump launched an airstrike in Syria over claims of Assad’s use of chemical weapons attacks in 2017, pundits from MSNBC and CNN lauded his aggression (only to later report that Mattis admitted the US lacked proof when they decided to launch the strike). Of the 47 editorials written about that strike in major outlets, only one expressed opposition. CNN host Fareed Zakaria praised him. “I think Donald Trump became president of the United States last night,” he said.

    In contrast, when Trump announced he would be bringing US troops home from Syria, the media called it a “win for Putin.” This pro-war push from the left is not a fringe trend in the age of Trump. As Greenwald reported in January of this year following the president’s (now compromised) plan to withdraw troops,

    Of people who voted for Clinton in 2016, only 26 percent support withdrawing troops from Syria, while 59 percent oppose it.

    He continued:

    While Democrats were more or less evenly divided early last year [2017] on whether the U.S. should continue to intervene in Syria, all that changed once Trump announced his intention to withdraw, which provoked a huge surge in Democratic support for remaining.

    Greenwald views this data as representative of a “reversal by Democrats on questions of war and militarism in the Trump era.”

    If Democrats were rationalizing Barack Obama’s pro-war policies when he was in power, they are now actively advocating for them as long as doing so is in defiance of Donald Trump.

    Despite his rhetoric, however, Trump’s overall foreign policy remains aggressive, and the media and Democrats’ animosity toward Russia could move the US toward a confrontation with Russia. In February, the Trump administration announced it was withdrawing from the decades-old “Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces” treaty with Russia that previously banned the placement of nuclear weapons in Europe. Both sides had accused each other of violating the agreement, and Putin warned of retaliation against the US should they position missiles in Europe. The Nation magazine observed that

    more than two years of Russiagate allegations, which have demonized both Trump and ‘Putin’s Russia,’ have probably made it easier, if not tempting, for Trump to quit the INF Treaty.

    Similarly, Russiagaters admonished Trump’s diplomacy summit with Putin last year, dismissing the fact that such talks have been a tradition for US presidents since Franklin D. Roosevelt met with Stalin.

    The Trump administration is also posturing against Russia in other parts of the world; his ongoing trade war with China is part of the reason for the nuclear treaty pull-out, and late last month, Trump ordered Russia to remove its troops from Venezuela. He has also imposed numerous rounds of sanctions on Russia and Russian officials and armed Ukraine against Russian interests.

    This is not the first time Russia scares have influenced global politics. The first Cold War and the threat of the Soviets’ destruction of democracy was a foundational justification for US wars in Korea and Vietnam, for example. The “domino theory” compelled the US government to act aggressively. Years later in Afghanistan, the CIA armed and funded the mujahideen, which evolved into al-Qaeda, in the name of beating back Soviet influence in the country.

    Afghanistan remains war-torn and overrun with terrorists to this day. US aggression has also been encouraged by the media’s complicity with unsubstantiated government claims, whether in their perpetuation of Lyndon Johnson’s Gulf of Tonkin lie or the weapons of mass destruction debacle in Iraq. The media and politicians’ use of flimsy claims to justify militarism is nothing new.

    Unfortunately, fears of external threats serve to catalyze public support for government conflict over diplomacy and cooperation, as the left-wing reaction to Russiagate demonstrates. Equally concerning is the willingness of many citizens to embrace this heightened tension and drumbeat of war under the “fake” presumption that doing so is equivalent to opposing Donald Trump.

    In truth, one of the best ways to do that is to oppose his aggressive foreign policy, which has real-life consequences for innocent people around the world and consequently puts the lives of Americans at risk. Considering the US media has refused to own its failures on Russiagate, it’s likely the pervasive anti-Russian hysteria will continue to the detriment of humanity.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • Excessive US Military Interventions Come with a Cost

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    There is a lot that’s wrong with US foreign policy right now, but a broader look at US grand strategy in the post-Cold War era reveals just how broken things have been across administrations of both parties.

    The post-Cold War era has seen a continuation of a long global trend toward greater peace and stability, lower rates of conflict, and zero great power wars. More peace and diminishing threats have merely enhanced the remarkable security already enjoyed by the United States thanks to its geographic isolation, weak neighbors, unparalleled economic and military power, and its nuclear deterrent.

    Continual Warfare

    But America doesn’t act as if it is safe. Instead, we have a hyper-interventionist foreign policy. Over the last century, according to the Rand Corporation, “there was only one brief period – the four years immediately after US withdrawal from Vietnam – during which the United States did not engage in any interventions abroad.” Indeed, “the number and scale of US military interventions rose rapidly in the aftermath of the Cold War, just as [rates of global] conflict began to subside.”

    According to data from the Congressional Research Service, the United States has engaged in more military interventions in the past 28 years than it had in the previous 190 years of its existence.* About 46 percent of Americans have lived the majority of their lives with the United States at war. Twenty-one percent have lived their entire lives in a state of war.

    This suggests a truly perverse defect in the way we are carrying out foreign policy. In an era of unprecedented peace and stability, which should permit a less activist foreign policy, we are finding reasons to intervene militarily at an extraordinary pace, making the past three decades a significant outlier in US history.

    America’s role in the world underwent a massive expansion following WWII and again at the end of the Cold War. Washington adopted policies and built bureaucracies that incentivized interventionism. As Joseph Schumpeter once put it in an essay on imperialism, “Created by the wars that required it, the machine now created the wars it required.”

    Normalizing Aberrant Policy

    In some ways, Americans have been insulated from the worst effects of this aberrant post-Cold War foreign policy (the costs have been borne more acutely by certain foreign populations on the receiving end of it). However, there have been costs here at home.

    The United States has spent almost $15 trillion on its military since 1990, an enormous price tag that far exceeds what any other country has spent. This constant state of war also tends to undermine liberal values at home by eroding constitutional checks and balances on war powers, incentivizing excessive government secrecy, and infringing on civil liberties in the name of security. In the oft-cited words of James Madison, “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

    As predicted, Donald Trump has maintained and in some ways expanded America’s militaristic and interventionist role in the world. And Trump’s rise is arguably another indication of how democratic norms can erode in the midst of continual warfare. As with most things, however, America’s unusual post-Cold War foreign policy and Trump’s convention-violating brashness has in many ways become normalized.

    If we are ever to break out of this apathy and return once again to a realistic and prudent foreign policy commensurate with the low-threat environment we currently inhabit, we will have to reckon with the steep costs of this expansive grand strategy and wrangle the self-sustaining national security bureaucracy into the austerity it desperately needs.

    *The data from the CRS report is helpful, but imperfect and incomplete. It lists 416 “notable deployments of US military forces overseas” from 1798-2017. It lists 212 interventions between 1798 and January 1989 and 204 since then. However, many of the individual items listed in the 19th century involve minor actions like deploying a small naval force to gain the release of a captured US citizen abroad or shows of force against pirates or mischievous whalers – deployments that are too minor to merit an individual itemized listing in later periods. Furthermore, “covert operations, disaster relief, and routine alliance stationing and training exercises are not included,” activities that are far more frequent now than they were in the past. One should consider the multiple covert undeclared drone wars the United States has waged in the post-9/11 era and, of course, programs of coordination with foreign militaries in conflict areas where US forces get killed or wounded, as in Niger recently, but which do not make it on to the list. Finally, CRS bundled many individual post-9/11 deployments and interventions together as a single item on the list, even though they are clearly distinct and included multiple countries in separate regions of the world. This is likely because the executive branch bundled them together when informing Congress of the deployments, which is the primary source for CRS’s data. Completely and accurately accounting for these discrepancies would require a full-length study, but my own ad hoc, and I think conservative, adjustments led me to a breakdown of 199 interventions from 1798 to January 1989 and 213 from 1989 to today.

    Reprinted from Cato Institute.


    John Glaser

    John Glaser is associate director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. His research interests include grand strategy, basing posture, U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, the rise of China, and the role of status and prestige motivations in international politics.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.




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  • Gary Johnson Lays Out a Sane, Coherent, Skeptical Foreign Policy

    Posted on by Azrael 1 Comment

    Gary Johnson laid out a very coherent, sensible, and “skeptical” foreign policy in a speech last week at the University of Chicago. In it, the Libertarian presidential candidate presented a worldview that is stark contrast to both “smart power” in the form of non-stop interventionism favored by Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton or the incoherent thuggery of the pro-torture and “bomb the shit out of ISIS” policies put forth by Republican nominee Donald Trump.

    Unfortunately, the speech got very little coverage by the political press, which seems less interested in covering Johnson’s actual foreign policy than it is in guffawing over his tough-to-watch “Aleppo” gaffe and other momentary brain farts of questionable significance.

    Contrary to the view that libertarian foreign policy tilts toward “isolationism,” Johnson invoked Ronald Reagan’s maxim of “peace through strength,” and noted that he supported military intervention in Afghanistan after 9/11/01. But he expressed dismay that after deposing the Taliban and essentially chasing much of Al Qaeda out of the country, U.S. forces remain in Afghanistan 15 years later.

    This alone is a refreshing divergence from the two major party candidates, who never miss an opportunity to make grandiose statements that their particular plan—such as killing ISIS’ leaders or bombing their oil reserves—is a fool-proof use of military resources.

    Pointing to two instances where U.S. interventions contributed to the deposing of two brutal dictators, but also created power vacuums which left each country far worse off, Johnson said:

    As for Iraq itself, well, it is obviously a tragic mess. Saddam was horrible, but is what we replaced him with any better?

    Libya. Same song, different verse. We used our military to help overthrow Qaddafi. Again, a bad guy and, by most standards, a war criminal. But what took his place? Did we have a plan? Did we consider the potential consequences, with which we are living today?

    I could go on, but the lesson is clear. Is it our fault that chaos has consumed nations such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, or that violent extremists have found homes in the wake of our interventions? No. It isn’t our fault alone. We had good intentions, but we intervened with no clear vision of the outcomes, and frankly, with no clear vision as to the overall U.S. interest, which should be the guiding principle.

    Unlike Donald Trump, who said he would only defend NATO allies if they contributed enough financially to the alliance, Johnson promised to “honor our commitments,” but also noted, “other countries around the world have grown too dependent upon U.S. military power”:

    The U.S. military exists, first and foremost, to defend the United States and U.S. vital interests. If our actions sometimes help others, that is a useful byproduct. But it shouldn’t be confused with the U.S. military’s—and the U.S. government’s—core mission. Instead, we should expect other countries to defend themselves and their interests. If they did so, they would have greater capabilities for dealing with local problems before they become global ones. We should want more countries who share our values to be acting to defend those values, not paying us to do it for them.

    Today, U.S. military spending accounts for roughly one-third of total military spending of the entire world, exceeding the combined total of the next seven largest military budgets including those of Russia and China. Here at home, military spending accounts for almost half of all discretionary federal spending.

    U.S. taxpayers are picking up the tab for far too many others around the world, and we simply cannot afford it.

    Perhaps most significantly, Johnson has taken the radical view that Congress should do its constitutional duty and be the governmental entity that actually declares wars:

    As for authorization, whatever happened to the constitutional notion that Congress should declare wars? The interventions that have cost thousands of lives and trillions of dollars over the past fifteen years have been conducted on the basis of authorizations passed by Congress in the aftermath of 9/11. Congress has since allowed the president to conduct “executive wars” while avoiding their responsibility to place a check—or an approval—on those wars. Yes, they have continued to fund them, but as far as casting the tough votes to drop bombs or deploy our young men and women, Congress has been AWOL.

    We need to honor the War Powers Act and force both Congress and the president to only engage in war with a clear authorization from both the Executive and Legislative Branches. As president, I will honor the War Powers Act, without hiding behind dubious legal opinions from my own lawyers.

    Johnson concluded with a call to end the “naive and misleading” fantasy that there will ever be a “V-I Day” to celebrate a decisive military victory over ISIS or any other iteration of the “Global War on Terror.” His plan for battling Islamic extremism focuses on “isolating” and “containing them,” by “starving them of the funds and support they must have to mount large-scale attacks,” rather than “dropping bombs” or putting “tens of thousands of boots on the ground.”

    Source: Gary Johnson Lays Out a Sane, Coherent, Skeptical Foreign Policy – Hit & Run : Reason.com



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