Biden and foreign policy

What is remarkable about the announced current Democratic candidates for the 2020 election is that almost all of them have little or nothing to say about foreign policy. They are focused almost entirely on domestic issues - health care, college costs, abortion issues, and the like. Except for sniping occasionally at Trump, they so far have said little about trade policy, national defense, or alliances. This suggests that Peter Zeihan is correct that we are moving toward an America largely withdrawn from the rest of the world.

Now it is interesting that Joe Biden has been leading the polls by a significant margin ever since he announced, which suggests among other things that the majority of Democratic voters are not thrilled with the far left candidates, much as the media hypes them.

But it does raise an interesting question. One for the few things that Trump seems to have done right is to overrule and clean out the neoliberal Washington foreign policy establishment that was dedicated (disastrously) to "liberal hegemony" - using American power to try to spread American-style democracy and capitalism into cultures neither ready for such a transformation nor particularly interested in making such a transformation."Nation building" has not worked out well for us, as the endless Middle East wars demonstrate.

The question is, if Biden were to be elected, would he bring back into power that neoliberal establishment?  One assumes he would surround himself with much the same experts that Obama did, and that Clinton would have used if she had been elected. If that were to happen, would we fall back into the same disastrous policies? It is an interesting question to ponder.

It is interesting….

During the Cold War intelligence analysts would watch the viewing stand during the annual Soviet Union May Day parade and try to guess the state of the internal power struggles by who was present or absent, and where people stood on the stand relative to Stalin. I am reminded of this by watching the current news leaks and TV appearances by the various FBI, CIA and DOJ players in the anti-Trump group that seem to suddenly be running for cover now that their own actions  are subject to investigation. Like the old Soviet Union, it is hard to tell what is actually happening when everyone is leaking and spinning and trying to “get ahead of the story” before the really bad news surfaces.

Now that the Muller report is out, without providing Democrats with the smoking gun they desperately wanted and were so sure they would get, Trump, via attorney general Barr, is on the offensive against his “deep state” opponents in the government, and it looks, from the leaks and TV appearances, like they are running scared and trying desperately to throw each other under the bus. Ex-FBI Director James Comey and ex-Attorney General Loretta Lynch are peddling conflicting stories about how the Clinton e-mails were handled. Ex-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and ex-Director of the CIA John Brennan have issued repeated statements recently distancing themselves from the now-discredited Steele dossier, and blaming Comey for pursuing it. And then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and then-Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe offer conflicting stories about whether Rosenstein once proposed wearing a wire to entrap President Trump.                                                  

One of the clues as to who is doing what to whom is the observation by several analysts that the DOJ tends to leak to the Washington Post, while the FBI favors leaking to the New York Times, so one can deduce some behavior by where a leak first appears.

And of course the FBI and the CIA hate each other, and the FBI hates the DOJ and vice versa, as many released emails from people like ex-FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page demonstrate. So there is clearly some bitter inter-agency knife fighting going on as well as the attempts by the principles to distance themselves from what will most likely be embarrassing revelations. The intelligence community in particular has been stonewalling requests by the Attorney General and several Senate Committees for documents relating to this case, trusting that they could use classification to keep their behavior secret. So of course they are panicked now that Trump has given the Attorney General full access and the power to declassify anything he thinks ought to be revealed.

And they are probably right to be worried. There are three serious independent (ie – not partisan,  not Senate) investigations under way at the moment. The Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, has been examining the FBI’s efforts to surveil a one-time Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page, and that report is expected soon. In March of 2018 then-Attorney General Jeff sessions appointed John Huber, the top federal prosecutor for Utah, to investigate the origins of what eventually became the Mueller investigation, and related FBI surveillance activities. More recently Attorney General Barr appointed John Durham, a longtime Department of Justice attorney and currently the chief federal prosecutor for Connecticut, to investigate roughly the same subject. There has already been enough material released to suggest that these investigations will find enough to seriously embarrass some of the principles, if not perhaps even subject some of them to criminal indictment.

Of course in the end Washington insiders take care of their own, so no doubt most will escape any serious charges however improper their behavior, except perhaps for the one or two picked to be scapegoats for the rest.  Accountability has never been Washington’s strong point.

Recommended: Work in the Age of Robots

I have written a number of  times in this blog about the risk that automation will put a lot of people out of work, and especially that we might develop an underclass of technologically-challenged people who would find it hard to earn a living in a more technological world. And I have by no means been the only one to worry about this issue, though it seems not yet to have reached the political class.

Mark Mills has written a short book, Work in the Age of Robots, which argues against this worry. As he points out, the history of disruptive technologies (the car replacing the horse, the power loom, mechanized agriculture, the steam engines, etc) shows that thus far such productivity enhancers produce more jobs than they destroy. The problem for forecasters at the time is that while it is clear what jobs might be lost, it is very hard to predict in advance what new jobs, and whole new fields,  might emerge as a result of the technological advance. It was easy to see how the automobile would put out of work all those people who bred, maintained and fed horses, but it was hard at the time to predict the emergence of all those jobs in the automobile supply chain, or the oil exploration and refining industry, or the road building industry. Mills argues, persuasively, that there is no reason to believe the pattern will be any different this time with the advent of AI and automation. Yes, people will lose jobs and have to retrain themselves, but he predicts there will be plenty of new jobs available for them.

Again, for those not inclined to find and read the book, there is an interview with Mark Mills on YouTube here in which he talks about the book.

Recommended: The Hell of Good Intentions

Along the same lines as the previous recommendation, let me recommend Stephen Walt's 2018 book The Hell of Good Intentions: America's Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of American Primacy. As with Mearsheimer's book, Walt deals with the mess that our Washington foreign policy elites have made of things, blinded by their well-intentioned but fatally misguided ideology of "liberal hegemony", the attempt to spread American-style democracy and capitalism throughout the world and into cultures which are neither prepared for such a transformation nor want it. I continue to be amazed at how naïve our supposedly well-educated ruling elites have proven to be about the real world and other cultures. The Ivy league schools who trained most of them so poorly have much to answer for.

Walt suggests a much better, more realistic, and more workable approach is the old realpolitic balance of power approach which worked so well for the British for hundreds of years, and so well for us in the Cold War. The Washington foreign policy elite won't like this book, because it doesn't make them look very good (but then, neither do our endless unwinnable wars in the Middle East make them look very good).

Again, for those who would prefer a lecture to reading the book, Professor Walt's 2018 presentation to the World Affairs Council, which can be viewed on YouTube here, covers much of the material in the book. Also worth watching is his 2018 presentation at the Watson Institute, Brown University, which can be viewed on YouTube here, and which discusses his concept of "offshore balancing".

Recommended: The Great Delusion

The past few administrations, of both political parties, have pursued a policy of "liberal hegemony", which aimed to use America's dominate power in the world to spread liberal democracy - American style - to all sorts of nations, often at the point of a gun. This has been the guiding philosophy of the Washington foreign policy establishment up until the current administration, and it has generally been a disaster, leaving us locked in endless Middle Eastern wars. Professor John Mearsheimer has undertaken to examine the fallacious philosophical underpinnings of this ideology in his new book The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities.

The short version of his argument is that liberals don't understand that nationalism and realism are far more powerful in the real world than the liberal dream, and so "liberal hegemony" as a policy (or perhaps, ideology) not only was bound to fail, as it has, but in fact has actively impeded the spread of liberal societies in the world.  This book is well worth reading and thinking about.

For those who would rather watch a lecture than read the book, let me suggest  John Mearsheimer's 2018 presentation to the Bonn Center for International Security and Governance, which can be seen on YouTube here, and which summarizes the contents of the book.