But observers would be wise to temper their pessimism. War does not proceed in a linear fashion. Defenders can hold for a long time and then suddenly break, allowing an attacker to make rapid gains before the defense solidifies further to the rear. The Ukrainians aim to generate exactly this effect — and there is reason to think they can. Ukraine’s offensive push is far from over. In fact, it is still in the early stages — just 10 weeks into what is likely to last at least four more months.

Penetrating a modern defense in depth such as the Russians established in southern Ukraine is a tall order for any military. The U.S. military has done it twice in modern memory, both times against Iraq. In 1991, after pummeling the Iraqi forces for 39 days from the air, a U.S.-led coalition of 650,000 troops penetrated and outflanked Iraqi defenses, crushing the Iraqi military in 100 hours. In 2003, a smaller U.S.-led force destroyed a badly degraded Iraqi military within a few weeks.

Read more in The Washington Post.

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It is clear why there is no independent Palestinian state. Put aside the original Arab rejection of the 1947 UN Partition Plan. In 2000, Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat walked away from a deal his own negotiators had hashed out, without any counter offer. In 2008, history repeated when Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered Palestinian Chairman Mahmoud Abbas more than 100 percent of the land area Palestinians declare occupied. Abbas rejected the deal. There are only two reasons why the Palestinian leadership walked away from peace: They cannot accept any peace that recognizes Israel as a Jewish state and they find the process and welfare offered by states like Australia more rewarding than independence itself.

The West Bank is disputed rather than occupied for a simple reason: There never was a Palestinian state and its previous rulers of the past 500 years—the Ottoman Empire, United Kingdom, and Jordan—foreswore sovereignty. Indeed, Palestinian national identity is a recent concept that grew alongside and in opposition to Zionism. The basis of the peace process—and the Oslo Accords—is peaceful negotiation of the land dispute. To argue the Oslo Accords no long apply is to suggest that, in Wong’s vision, binding agreements have a lifespan of 30 years. To make an end run around negotiations encourages recalcitrance, not peace. Add into the mix the 2002 UN Human Rights Commission decision to endorse “all available means, including armed struggle” to establish a Palestinian state, and Wong puts Australia on the path to rationalizing suicide bombing.

Wong should stand up to the Apartheid canard. While Israel welcomes its Arab citizens as equals, the Palestinian Authority demands its territory be judenrein. Wong sides not with democracy, liberalism, or plurality, but instead with religious apartheid. This is a tragedy for Australia’s international brand. If adults like Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Wong do not stand up to Australian Labor Party radicals, they risk aligning Australia diplomatically more with rejectionist states like Iran and Syria than with Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and even Sudan and Saudi Arabia.

Wong also gratuitously throws a wrench into the gears of decades-old, bipartisan Australian diplomacy to encourage normalization between majority Muslim Southeast Asian states and Israel. Indeed, consider the progress made by signaling to Palestinian leaders that they will not hold hostage peace and normalization to their own corruption and refusal to compromise. In just the past five years, Israel has doubled the Arab states with which it has diplomatic relations, with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states in the queue.

What happens in the Middle East does not stay in the Middle East. There is little difference between Australia’s position on Palestinian sovereignty and Russia’s arguments for awarding after-the-fact sovereignty to states like the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute Executive Director Justin Bassi may dismiss and even censor discussion of precedent, but he is simply wrong and does Australia a disservice by pretending its actions do not matter. Nor, for that matter, can Canberra now say that Communist China cannot lay claim to the entirety of Taiwan, a country it has never truly controlled, when it allows Palestinian representatives absent any electoral mandate to do the same with regard to West Bank. The Australian Labor precedent can be pursued ad nauseum, even transforming Australia’s virtue signaling acknowledgments of native custodianship into something more.

As Albanese and Wong head into Labor’s national conference in Brisbane, they may soon understand what Israel does: Appeasing radicals and maximalists does not bring peace, but only demands for more. Such a tragic waste of Australia’s moral capital.

The post Australia Takes Step Backwards on Middle East Peace, Encourages Terror appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

• While the United States still enjoys advantages over China in many key fields of national security competition, recent trends illustrate that American military dominance is stagnating and China is rapidly catching up.
• China is successfully leveraging asymmetric structural advantages, such as its authoritarian military-civil fusion and geographical position in the Indo-Pacific, to rapidly reach parity with or exceed the United States’ military capabilities.
• Further complacency about these issues will only ensure that Chinese capabilities surpass those of the United States sooner than expected.

Read the PDF.

Read the one-pager.

Introduction

In military capability and capacity, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the United States may soon be on an equal footing. US House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL) recently affirmed that “China is rapidly approaching parity with the United States.”¹ A few years ago, the Defense Department’s 2020 China military power report similarly noted, “China has already achieved parity with—or even exceeded—the United States in several military modernization areas.”² The report highlighted land-based conventional ballistic and cruise missiles, shipbuilding, and integrated air defense systems as key areas of concern.

A recent development in these concerning trends is a memo that US Strategic Command sent to Congress in January 2023.³ That memo revealed a startling finding: China now has more land-based (stationary and mobile) intercontinental ballistic missile launchers than the United States. This is but one instance in a string of examples of China rapidly catching up and exceeding the United States in military capability and capacity.

Beijing continues to leverage key structural advan­tages that are accelerating these gains. According to the Pentagon, China’s national strategy considers military modernization a key component of its effort to revise the international order to support Beijing’s system of governance and national interests.⁴ It demonstrates this intention through strategies such as military-civil fusion, which blurs or eliminates barriers between government and commercial sectors to build a more capable military at a rapid clip. Compared to the US, China develops and produces advanced capabilities at a fraction of the cost and time by avoiding burdensome bureaucratic processes that provide oversight and allow for open competition.

China also benefits from its geography in the Indo-Pacific: The likely near-term theaters of conflict are close to the PRC’s shores and thousands of miles from the US mainland. For this reason, China need not even wait to surpass America’s raw capabilities to obtain the competitive advantage in several key areas. Following is an overview of 10 areas in which the US national secu­rity apparatus has fallen behind or is due to fall behind the Chinese military, absent significant efforts and intervention.

Read the full report.

Notes

1. Michael R. Gordon, “China Has More ICBM Launchers Than U.S., American Military Reports,” Wall Street Journal, February 7, 2023, https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-has-more-icbm-launchers-than-u-s-american-military-reports-11675779463.
2. US Department of Defense, Office of the Secretary of Defense, Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China: Annual Report to Congress, 2020, vii, https://media.defense.gov/2020/Sep/01/2002488689/-1/-1/1/2020-DOD-CHINA-MILITARY-POWER-REPORT-FINAL.PDF.
3. Anthony J. Cotton, letter to Senate Armed Services Committee Ranking Member, January 26, 2023, https://armedservices.house.gov/sites/republicans.armedservices.house.gov/files/HASC%20Response%20-%20China%20ICBM%20Notification.pdf.
4. US Department of Defense, Office of the Secretary of Defense, Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China: Annual Report to Congress, 2022, iii, https://media.defense.gov/2022/Nov/29/2003122279/-1/-1/1/2022-MILITARY-AND-SECURITY-DEVELOPMENTS-INVOLVING-THE-PEOPLES-REPUBLIC-OF-CHINA.PDF.

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Event Summary

On July 26, US Commerce Secretary Gina M. Raimondo and Sen. Todd Young (R-IN), joined by AEI’s Derek Scissors and Chris Miller, discussed the future of US semiconductor policy and its role in economic and national security.

During the first half of the event, Secretary Raimondo discussed the CHIPS and Science Act, its importance to protect US national security interest, and the legislation’s impact on the domestic semiconductor industry. Sen. Young stressed the role of smooth cooperation between Congress and the Department of Commerce in implementing the legislation, which prompted huge private investment and the creation of semiconductor-focused academic programs. Commenting on US successes and failures in coordinating chips policy internationally, Mr. Miller remarked that diplomacy has played an outsized role in challenging Chinese access to the most advanced production technology.

The second half of the event featured a panel discussion with Rob Atkinson of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, Mr. Scissors, and Emily Weinstein of the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, moderated by Mr. Miller. The panelists discussed export control and licensing on chips, partial decoupling, artificial intelligence in the military, and how the US could learn from China by adopting a more offensive industrial policy.

—Cindy Chen

Event Description

Computer chips are crucial to American national security. As we approach the one-year anniversary of the CHIPS and Science Act, how do policymakers view its implementation so far? How can policymakers boost domestic innovation and the manufacturing of computer chips? How do we ensure a reliable and secure supply chain, currently under threat by China?

Join AEI’s Derek Scissors and Chris Miller for a conversation with US Commerce Secretary Gina M. Raimondo and Sen. Todd Young (R-IN) to address these questions and explore a crucial aspect of US national and economic security. Following, a panel will continue the conversation.

This event is part of AEI’s “A New China Playbook,” a series that seeks to highlight America’s chance to exploit the Chinese Communist Party’s failures and guard against an increasingly vulnerable, yet less predictable, China.

Event Materials

Event Transcript

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Nuclear threats by Russian officials and pundits aren’t new, of course. Russian President Vladimir Putin has implicitly threatened nuclear use throughout the conflict, deployed nuclear weapons in Belarus, and used his strategic nuclear forces to deter NATO from directly intervening in the war. Putin claimed he’s put Russian nuclear forces on alert. The nuclear chatter has revived concerns that Russia, if faced with defeat in Ukraine, could choose to use nuclear weapons. 

I believe it is prudent to plan for nuclear escalation and that there are four scenarios for Russian nuclear employment that policymakers should consider. They range from a nuclear strike on Ukrainian armor to a strike on NATO territory. These scenarios may be unthinkable, but it is important to talk through them so that U.S. officials and European allies can grapple with the challenges that any such escalation would entail, and plan a response accordingly.

Continue reading . . .

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Ambassador Kurt Volker is the former U.S. Ambassador to NATO, the former U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine. He’s now a distinguished fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis and a founding partner of the American University in Kyiv.

The post WTH Did Biden Blow It on NATO and Ukraine? Ambassador Kurt Volker Explains appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

The breakthrough made early headlines from the meeting. President Erdoğan had been blocking Swedish accession for months, demanding that Sweden extradite about 120 alleged Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) activists and Gülenists (something the U.S. also locks horns with Turkey over); lift its embargo of arms to Turkey; and adopt friendlier legislation on terrorism, “mechanisms to prevent provocations,” and even changes to its constitution. Turkey got commitments on most of these measures. But then, on the eve of the summit, Erdoğan added yet another precondition: Turkey’s admission to the European Union. Fortunately, and somewhat surprisingly, Erdoğan assented to NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s bargain, which evidently included a bilateral meeting with President Joe Biden, U.S. delivery of F-16 fighter planes to Turkey, and the creation of a NATO “special coordinator for counterterrorism.”

But with Erdoğan, nothing is ever over, and we may yet see another round of negotiations, because Swedish courts have now (after the agreement was announced) blocked extraditions and the Turkish Parliament won’t be in session for another two months, so there is time for more demands.

The great success in Vilnius was the adoption of a comprehensive plan for meeting NATO’s fundamental responsibility—defending its members’ territory. The alliance has had no such program since 1991. Attempting to allay Russian concern about extending the security of NATO membership to former Warsaw Pact and then to former Soviet Union countries, NATO professed to have no reason to station either nuclear weapons or substantial combat forces in the new member countries. That commitment was contingent on the security environment, which has changed dramatically with Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.

The new plans adopted in Vilnius run to 4,000 pages—a testament to their seriousness—and the governments of NATO countries have agreed to them. They allow NATO military commanders to task different national forces with specific obligations, facilitating an effective common defense should a NATO ally be attacked. And the arrangement locks in a sharing of responsibilities between the United States and its European allies, which will need to reduce their reliance on Washington by increasing their military spending and providing space and cyber assets of their own.

Coalition warfare is a delicate and difficult undertaking. Understanding in advance what allies are willing to do, and where their forces’ strengths can best be matched to need, will reassure those allies most exposed to potential Russian aggression and improve the ability of all of the allies to act effectively together. Just the fact that NATO has designed, agreed to, and set aside resources for these plans should help deter attacks on its frontline states.

The Vilnius meeting did not conclude, however, without a disappointment. More than 500 days have passed since Russia invaded Ukraine. Although they have supplied Ukraine with weapons and cooperation, the United States and the United Kingdom have failed to fully honor the commitment they made to ensure Ukraine’s security, in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear arsenal, under the Budapest Memorandum of 1994. All the while, Kyiv has been agitating for a clear path to joining NATO. Ukraine acknowledged that membership wasn’t possible while the country was still at war (although NATO has in the past found creative solutions to that problem), but hoped for a pledge that once the war was over, it would become a member. Instead, President Biden said ahead of the Vilnius meeting that Ukraine wasn’t ready for NATO membership.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was incensed. He posted an enraged tweet in the face of rebuffs from both National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace; the latter suggested that Ukraine ought to show gratitude for all the support it’s been given.

NATO countries have indeed strongly backed Ukraine, but for people in safety to tell those under attack that they should be grateful is unbecoming. The Biden administration unfairly wants to benefit from its expansive rhetoric—the U.S. president has promised to support Ukraine “for as long as it takes” for Ukraine to win the war—without facing criticism for the timorousness of its decisions regarding the weapons Ukraine desperately needs. Washington is still holding back long-range munitions such as Army Tactical Missile Systems, for example, under a policy driven by what The Washington Post describes as the “conviction that a U.S. misstep in Ukraine could start World War III.”

President Biden isn’t wrong to be concerned about the risk of direct involvement in the war, nor is he wrong to be stingy about extending NATO’s Article 5 security guarantee to a country at war with Russia. But the administration is wrong, both morally and practically, to defend those choices by effectively disparaging all that Ukraine is doing. Casually dismissing Ukraine’s readiness for NATO membership feels of a piece with President Biden blaming the debacle of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan on Afghan security forces instead of on our own policies.

The standards for NATO membership have always been subjective. They were subjective when Greece and Turkey had military coups after being admitted in 1952; when a divided Germany’s western half was admitted in 1955; when a democratizing Spain was admitted in 1982. More demanding standards have been set and relaxed depending on the geostrategic circumstances, and those geostrategic circumstances argue for having given Ukraine a more morale-boosting prospect of eventual membership.

Losing his composure was one of Zelensky’s few diplomatic missteps in the course of  this war, and he quickly corrected it. The Ukrainian president’s subsequent spin was reminiscent of Winston Churchill’s after the 1941 meeting at which Britain wanted but did not get American commitments to fight Nazi Germany: closer than ever, not whether but when.

At the same time as the NATO summit, the G7 released a statement that the members would begin negotiating bilateral security arrangements with Ukraine. It was intended to be less than a NATO commitment but more than nothing. But the group’s promise was only to begin discussions—about commitments from the very countries that have been unwilling to make security commitments through NATO, and, in the case of the U.S. and the U.K., those that failed to carry out the commitments they made to Ukraine in 1994.

The best possible gloss to put on Ukraine’s continued exclusion from NATO is that the Biden White House moved next year’s 75th-anniversary NATO summit four months past the actual anniversary and closer to the 2024 presidential election in order to make a big political splash welcoming Ukraine into the NATO family at a time of maximal political value to the president. Here’s hoping the political operatives in the White House prove less timid than the national-security team.

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Prigozhin’s mutiny showed that Putin’s state is brittle in its form and ability to respond to crises. While tangible differences among Russia’s elite class have fed disputes since the first months of Russia’s Ukraine invasion, none appeared to have crossed into the realm of outright revolt until Wagner’s June 2023 mutiny. Though Prigozhin may have unsuccessfully banked on the support of certain regional elites or well as a subset of, that same system of civil and military elites either chose not (or lacked the ability) to leap to the defense of the Kremlin. Whether he was involved in the mutiny or not, the reported possibility that a high-ranking military official such as General Sergei Surovikin had foreknowledge of the Wagner putsch underlines how much the Kremlin itself may have been caught off guard by the event.

As military leaders mostly stood by as Wagner captured the city of Rostov-on-Don and advanced on Moscow, civilian leaders either offered rhetorical condemnations of the mutiny or simply remained silent on the matter as it played out. This dynamic of elite waffling could be a complicating factor for the Kremlin as it lays the foundation for the choreography surrounding the Russian 2024 presidential election.

Despite Belarusian leader Alexandr Lukashenko’s mediation of an agreement between Prigozhin and the Kremlin which halted Wagner’s march on Moscow, the mutiny also underlined how Russia’s leadership cannot rely on outside help in moments of peril. While a Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) force swept in to Kazakhstan a year and a half ago to save the embattled government of President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, no such aid was forthcoming for Russia’s leadership. While it has not officially requested aid from CSTO for its war in Ukraine or this past month’s crisis, it is unlikely that any assistance would have been dispatched by other members of an alliance whose cohesion has suffered tremendously if such a request had been made as a series of regional disturbances following have reduced its cohesion. The mutiny could also be reason for pause in Beijing, who will now have good reason to doubt the staying power of its most significant partner for future competition with the US.

However, the eventual outcome of the mutiny was far from a worst-case scenario for the Kremlin. The overall passive approach of Russia’s elite to this crisis can be interpreted a sign of regime fragility, but it can also be seen as indication that Russia’s elite is not necessarily eager to replace Putin in the short-term future, too. While Prigozhin and Wagner’s future in Belarus remains uncertain (with the mercenary group reportedly continuing, then temporarily ceasing, direct recruitment into its ranks following the mutiny), the main challenge to the defense ministry’s authority appears to be sidelined for now.

Notwithstanding the considerable apprehension which a mutiny like Prigozhin’s in a nuclear power such as Russia’s naturally engenders, the deal struck by Putin and Prigozhin has prevented the emergence of wider power struggle within Russia. Prigozhin and Russia’s leadership can look to the case of Sudan’s ongoing internal conflict as a cautionary tale. In Sudan, the leader of the Rapid Support Forces (which was resistant to attempts to rapidly fold it into the Sudanese Armed Forces, similar to Wagner’s pre-mutiny refusal of direct integration into the Russian Defense Ministry) chose to press forward and continue fighting the central government of General al-Burhan, sparking open fighting across the country which is yet to be resolved. In a more positive direction for him, President Putin can look to the example of his “dear friend” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, who weathered a 2016 military coup attempt and used the opportunity to consolidate power in his hands. In his declaration following the mutiny’s end that Russian society and institutions had rallied around the flag in a moment of need, Putin clearly seeks to depict a story of post-putsch regime consolidation.

It is important to observe that the fallout of Prigozhin’s mutiny is far from settled. Even if future events clarify that June’s episode was a failed final stand of Prigozhin and Wagner, individual players inside the Russian system (and potentially “outside,” in the case of Lukashenko) could see their careers boosted in return for their role in bringing the mutiny to an end. What is clear, though, is that this revolt has triggered a rebalancing of the internal balance of power within the Russian state, the complete effects of which are yet to be seen.

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So it’s only natural that something as potentially disruptive as a second Donald Trump presidency is entering their calculus. Trump may be in prison come January 2025, or he may be in the Oval Office — rarely has more uncertainty attended the fate, personal and political, of a major candidate. Yet the mere possibility of Trump’s return is already shaping international affairs.

Over the past year, I’ve had discussions about the future of US foreign policy with officials and analysts from multiple continents. From the halls of the Kremlin to the tense waters of the Western Pacific, the possibility of a Trump resurrection is affecting global strategy and diplomacy in ways that present opportunities — but many more challenges — for those conducting US policy in the here and now.

Trump’s foreign policy was a bewildering medley of tradition and revolution.

Candidate Trump ran for the presidency on a platform as radical as that of any major contender in modern history. He didn’t just threaten to “cancel” the Paris climate accords and the Iran nuclear deal. He didn’t simply deprecate democratic values while offering admiring compliments to anti-American tyrants.

The core issue was that Trump openly mused about abandoning US allies, ripping up trade deals, and tearing down the international system the US had spent decades constructing. Even the language Trump used was taken from another era: “America First” was the movement that preached isolation as the world burned in 1940-41.

By this standard, Trump’s presidency was remarkably normal. The US withdrew from no alliances; it cut no grand bargains with rivals. If anything, America took sharper positions toward China and Russia, while strengthening the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s presence in Eastern Europe and investing in bodies, such as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, meant to secure the Indo-Pacific — initiatives Trump’s successor, Joe Biden, has adopted as his own.

The Trump administration typically opted to renegotiate, rather than terminate, trade deals; it intensified the campaign against the Islamic State while pursuing closer ties with traditional US partners in the Persian Gulf.

These policies could have been the handiwork of any Republican president. Even where Trump did pull back more dramatically, such as withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and trying to do likewise from Afghanistan, he was mostly in step with US politics and public opinion. In these respects, America First was part of the national mood, which is why Biden has sometimes found himself emulating Trump’s economic protectionism and his military retrenchment from the Middle East.

Yet in other ways, it definitely wasn’t business as usual during the Trump years. No prior president had so eagerly unwound the most painstakingly negotiated multilateral agreements reached by his predecessor — the Paris accords, the Iran nuclear deal and TPP. No prior president had so gleefully practiced economic confrontation with America’s friends as well as its enemies. No prior president had so assiduously praised the likes of Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, while brawling repeatedly with democratic allies. No prior president had so outrageously undermined US policy for dirt on his chief political rival.

No prior president had tried to terminate US military interventions with a tweet; no prior president had governed with such incompetence and chaos. And never before had the threat of more radical departures been so omnipresent: Trump’s advisers had to dissuade, or simply bamboozle, the chief executive when he sought to quit NATO, the North American Free Trade Agreement and other trade and security pacts.

Trump clearly preferred the angry, atavistic unilateralism he had campaigned on rather than the more measured American internationalism his administration often delivered. And the general rule was that the more the president participated in any issue, the Trumpier the policy got. As one high-ranking US official told me, things were normal during the Trump years — until the president got involved.

The reason the policies were more orthodox than the president had much to do with the inertia created by decades of American globalism. Trump may have hated NATO, but the patterns of institutionalized cooperation the alliance fosters help keep transatlantic relations on course.

It also had to do with personnel and politics. Trump’s Republican allies on Capitol Hill were mostly committed internationalists, willing to defy him on issues — whether Russian sanctions or troop withdrawals from South Korea — where he might have taken US policy off the rails.

Because Trump was such a foreign affairs neophyte, he surrounded himself with aides — Secretary of State James Mattis and National Security Advisers H.R. McMaster and John Bolton, among others — who disagreed with him on policy matters and, in some cases, detested him personally. Some of those advisers headed complex, unwieldy bureaucracies that Trump found difficult to move. In other words, the Trump revolution was moderated by powerful constraints, which might not be there in the future.

There’s little chance Trump, so vexed by his advisers during his first term, would appoint anyone but committed loyalists during a second. He has already announced plans to purge and politicize the civil service. Trump would also have greater, though certainly not total, control of a Republican Party that has been remade in his political image over the past eight years. Not least, a Trump with more experience might not be so tempered by inertia this time around: Top aides such as Bolton believe he might have withdrawn from NATO had he won a second term in 2020.

Of course, we can only speculate about what Trump might do about NATO or any other issue if he returns to power. Would he cut off aid to Ukraine in a bid to end that war “in 24 hours?” Would he again trade geopolitical benefits for political favors? Would he withdraw from the World Trade Organization and ditch Biden’s climate-change agenda?

Those are questions that countries around the world are asking themselves. Much rides on the choices of a superpower. So the prospect of Trump 2.0 is already having global effects.

Exhibit A is the most consequential issue the world faces: The war in Ukraine.

Putin has gotten himself into a truly terrible position: A war that was supposed to end with a glorious thunder run into Kyiv is devouring his army and destabilizing his regime. But Putin keeps fighting for several reasons — because of his obsession with Ukraine and renewing the Russian empire; because he calculates Kyiv will run out of men and materiel over time; and because he believes the Western coalition will crack after November 2024.

Trump has bragged that Putin never invaded Ukraine on his watch. Yet Putin may now see Trump as his path to salvation.

Trump has said that Russia will eventually “take over all of Ukraine.” He laments that America is “giving away so much equipment.” The scenario that gives Putin hope, high-ranking US officials have hinted in public — and stated explicitly in private — is one in which Trump is reelected and then pressures Kyiv to settle while winding down America’s life-giving aid. This is more or less what Trump has said he would do, and what Putin’s top European ally, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, has predicted.

The reality might not be so simple. Senate Republicans strongly support Ukraine, even if Republican voters are conflicted. British officials are confident that the UK and other European countries would keep backing Kyiv even if the US dropped out.

But perception can make its own reality, and the chance of a Trump restoration is helping protract a devastating war by giving Putin confidence that his persistence may pay off in the end. Which is also why Ukraine feels such pressure to succeed in its current offensive: This is its best chance to retake territory and make the case for further aid before the politics of the war potentially shift in 2024.

The possibility of Trump’s return is also creating opportunities for China. No one should expect Trump to drastically mellow US policy: His trade platform for 2024 promises to “tax China to build up America.” Chinese analysts certainly aren’t holding their breath for a return to “rationality” in Washington.

But everyone should expect Trump to neglect the careful coalition-building that has characterized US policy under Biden — an approach, one Chinese hawk comments, that has caused more “difficulties” and “pressure” than “Trump’s unilateral strategy” did. In particular, a second Trump presidency would likely create new wedges between Washington and Europe, the group of democratic allies the former president so enjoyed tormenting. That fact is not lost on Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Since ending its Covid-zero policy and muting its wolf-warrior diplomats, China has welcomed President Emmanuel Macron of France, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and other European leaders to Beijing. The goal is to sustain and strengthen Europe’s trade and tech ties to China, reducing the chances European countries will align fully with Washington against Beijing.

Xi has many reasons to pursue this policy: Geopolitics dictate trying to distance America from its allies. But quasi-official mouthpieces are relishing the polarization and division another Trump presidency would bring. And with 56% of Europeans saying a future Trump administration would damage the transatlantic relationship, this strategy makes all the more sense if Beijing believes the US will start sabotaging its own alliances again.

What about the Persian Gulf? Here, Biden has no shortage of troubles as he tries to navigate relations with autocratic allies, namely Saudi Arabia, while reviving some détente with America’s adversary, Iran. Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s government in Saudi Arabia is in no hurry to placate the US on human rights, oil prices or other issues, in part because it may fare better if Trump — who took a “see no evil” approach to the kingdom’s political excesses and regional destabilization — comes back.

The Saudis “have chosen Trump over Biden, and they’re sticking to their bet,” former CIA official Bruce Riedel has said. One reason the Iranians, for their part, have been slow to return to any nuclear deal with Washington is that their experience with Trump showed that future presidents can simply tear up any executive agreement their predecessors ink.

The shadow of a Trumpian future thus informs the calculations of America’s friends as well as its foes. Yet the effects aren’t all terrible for the US.

In Europe, Trump-phobia does limit the willingness to follow the US into a sharper posture vis-à-vis China, because the continent can’t afford to find itself facing high tensions with both Trump’s Washington and Xi’s Beijing. The experience with Trump has certainly motivated Macron to keep pushing “strategic autonomy,” not that many countries want a European project led by Paris.

Yet fear of what may come also seems to be encouraging the European Union to work more closely with the Biden administration on climate issues, technological cooperation and Ukraine, in recognition that there isn’t infinite time to lock in transatlantic gains. Uncertainty does sometimes yield diplomatic leverage.

In East Asia, too, the US may be benefitting from uncertainty. Just look at what is happening in Japan.

Tokyo is conducting a halfway-revolution in foreign and defense policy. In the past year, it has sealed plans to vastly increase military spending so it can purchase fifth-generation fighter jets and “counterstrike” missiles that bring China and North Korea within range. Tokyo has signed a mini-alliance of sorts with Australia; it is expanding engagement across Southeast Asia. Japan was once content to free-ride on American protection. But as China pushes for regional and global hegemony, Tokyo is making itself a more potent player in the Western Pacific and beyond.

Japanese officials say these reforms will make their country a better ally to the US — and bilateral cooperation is flourishing. But they also admit, in private, that Japan is shortening the runway to a more independent foreign policy should the US lapse back into America First unilateralism. As columnist Hiro Akita puts it, Japan prefers a “Plan A+” in which the US and its allies do more together. Yet Tokyo also needs a “Plan B” in case it must look after itself.

It’s a mistake to make everything about Trump, of course. The specter of change after the next election always hangs over US diplomacy. The possibility of Trump’s return is hardly the only thing shaping policies around the world. It’s also silly to pretend that Trump is the sole source of tension with US allies: Many European countries dislike Biden’s tech and green energy subsidies, which seem like Democratic echoes of Trump’s agenda.

Yet Trump is still one of a kind. Yes, a President Ron DeSantis might cause problems for Ukraine. A second-term President Biden might not do much to restart the global trade agenda. But no other candidate has the combination of illiberalism, unilateralism and incompetence that marked Trump’s first term — and might prove still more disruptive in the second.

A concern I have heard many times is that the world is more dangerous than a half-decade ago, amid a hot war in Ukraine, a cold war between America and China, a slow-motion nuclear crisis with Iran, and other problems. The margin for erratic or gratuitously abrasive behavior by a global superpower is smaller than when Trump first held office, which makes the expected implications of a return more pronounced.

The responses we have seen to those expectations aren’t uniformly damaging, from Washington’s perspective. If the possibility of a Trump return hastens Japan’s transition from a consumer to a provider of security in the Indo-Pacific, what’s not to like? In an odd way, the ideal equilibrium might be one in which Trump or someone like him never retakes the White House, but the chance of that happening still spurs greater activism among countries committed to the present international order.

But in the end, Trump’s shadow is largely shaping the world in less favorable ways. It encourages Putin to hang tough in a terrible war. It adds to Beijing’s hopes of splitting America from its European friends. It deprives the US government of leverage in dealing with friends and foes in the Middle East.

It would be unfair to blame Trump for all of these strategic problems. It’s not unfair to say that he contributes to them. Whether or not he wins the presidency again, the Age of Trump isn’t over. The challenge his return could pose for US policy is already here.

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Derek Scissors is a senior fellow at AEI, where he focuses on the Chinese and Indian economies and on US economic relations with Asia. He is concurrently the chief economist of the China Beige Book.

Check out his recent work on a New China Playbook.

Read the recent working paper by Jesús Fernández-Villaverde mentioned in this episode.

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As you enter the building, a placard declares the startling human cost of world communism: Over 100 million people have been killed since Lenin took power. Josef Stalin supposedly said that whereas one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. He would certainly know. The mind cannot comprehend such mass misery; it glazes over. The VOC Museum’s curators overcome this problem by highlighting individual human tragedies. Visitors are shown in the most vivid way possible—through recordings, written testimonies, and more—that the casualties of communism were individual human beings.

In a sense, the victims of communism number far more than 100 million. If we consider those forced to live under this tyrannical system, tortured by it, or driven from their homes because of it, then the numbers are far greater. My grandparents were German-speaking Anabaptists living in Ukraine over one hundred years ago. As the Bolshevik revolution plunged the region into deepening repression, famine, and civil war, violent anarchists as well as communists struggled for control over local villages. Pacifist peasant communities that successfully built a life for themselves over preceding generations were a natural target. My grandfather’s family was terrorized, and his father was killed. Desperate to survive, the remaining members of the family managed to travel to the Baltic, then across the Atlantic Ocean. Settling in Western Canada during the early 1920s, they created a new life for themselves, just as their ancestors once did. Working hard in a free country, they farmed the land, went to church, raised a family, and smiled. But they passed on to their grandson a profound mistrust toward the supposed benefits of socialism.

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Event Summary

AEI’s Zack Cooper was joined for a conversation with Amb. Nikki Haley, the former US representative to the United Nations and governor of South Carolina, to address pressing questions about the United States and explore the future of US-China policy. As part of AEI’s “A New China Playbook,” this series seeks to highlight America’s chance to exploit the Chinese Communist Party’s failures and guard against an increasingly vulnerable, yet less predictable, China.

Amb. Haley spoke on a range of issues facing the United States in the Indo-Pacific region. Amb. Haley discussed the important role that allies and partners play in blunting Chinese aggression and how the United States can build more robust relationships with them. She elaborated on how the US can use diplomatic tools that promote American interests and confront the China challenge. She also emphasized the link between the fate of Ukraine and that of the Indo-Pacific. Amb. Haley argued that US power in Asia would diminish if the United States failed to support Ukraine.

—Connor Fiddler

Event Description

China’s growing political, economic, and military threats remain the foremost challenges to US national security. How can the US maintain its competitive edge to counter China’s authoritarian rise? Where can Washington strengthen partnerships with key allies to bolster American posture in the Indo-Pacific? What more should policymakers do to oppose the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) malign influence across the globe? Does Ukraine provide any lessons for the defense of Taiwan?

Join AEI’s Zack Cooper for a conversation with Amb. Nikki Haley, the former US representative to the United Nations and governor of South Carolina, to address these questions and explore the future of US-China policy. As part of AEI’s “A New China Playbook,” this series seeks to highlight America’s chance to exploit the CCP’s failures and guard against an increasingly vulnerable, yet less predictable, China.

AEI is a non-partisan nonprofit organization, and AEI scholars do not take institutional positions on issues or candidates for public office. This ongoing policy forum seeks to explore the future of US-China policy.

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None of these trendy renewable energy sources is a panacea. Wind farms shred migratory birds, and solar farms fry them. Dams can wreak havoc on ecosystems. None produce energy as cheaply as fossil fuels, even after decades of government incentives and subsidies. Too often, however, alternative energy advocates ignore nuclear energy.

Nuclear power plants are shutting down across the United States; the Three Mile Island plant famous for a partial meltdown in 1979 will close completely in 2019. Nuclear plants produce zero emissions, and utilities (and, by extension tax payers), have paid off the capital investment decades ago. Even if many of the arguments against oil are spurious, oil alone won’t provide energy security, especially as, history shows, its price rotates between peaks and valleys. As Americans shift toward alternative energy, can the United States meet its energy needs without nuclear power?

A new book being released next month by the Hoover Institution suggests not. Written by Jeremy Carl and David Fedor, two energy experts who respectively have experience making nuclear power plants safer and building them, Keeping the Lights On at America’s Nuclear Power Plants argues that, while nuclear power alone is not a panacea to resolve energy problems, the United States won’t be able to solve its energy needs without nuclear power playing a major role.

They make a persuasive case: While nuclear power provides about 20 percent of U.S. electricity today, it accounts for two-thirds of carbon and pollution-free power produced. They do not ignore the downside of nuclear power, but nor do they exaggerate it. They note that nuclear power releases less radioactivity into the surrounding environment than burning coal. Nuclear power has also produced less death and injury to humans than any other form of energy production.

Security matters. The U.S. investment in nuclear plants has given the United States unique leverage. “We know that our country’s dominance in civilian nuclear power has been a key part of America’s ability to set norms and rules not just for power plants in less stable places around the world but also for the con­trol of nuclear weapon proliferation,” they write. The nuclear plant building boom in East Asia and the Middle East means that reactor technology will continue to develop and become safer.

The authors are realists. They lament the polemics and “zero-sum mindset” so many activists adopt. Instead, they recognize that “Fans of gas or nuclear, electric cars or oil exports, fracking or rooftop solar—in the end, all are linked by common markets and governments. Each shot fired in anger ricochets through the system, sometimes with unexpected consequences.”

The whole monograph is worth reading. The authors are both academics and experts, but write clearly and make the technical and regulatory issues easily digestible. They are environmentalists but do not allow politics or polemics blind them to science. They are policy prescriptive, and make the case that—whether Democrat or Republican and whether at the federal or state levels—nuclear power is not going away. If the United States turns its back on nuclear energy generation, the consequences will be felt environmentally, economically, and in terms of global energy influence. Keeping the Lights On should be on the reading list of any serious executive or legislative branch energy-issue policymaker, and the journalists who cover them.

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In the decades since, for example, hagiography has painted Mosaddegh as a democrat and the rightful ruler of Iran. In reality, he was neither: He was a democratic only like Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti was a democrat—perfectly happy to utilize the rhetoric of democracy but those who disagreed with him might have found themselves lynched.

Then there’s the issue of legitimacy. A couple months ago, I debated former Ambassador Chas Freeman at Brown University. In the question-and-answer session which followed, an audience member argued that the United States committed original sin by overthrowing Iran’s rightful ruler and placing the dictatorial shah in his place. This also misreads events. The prime ministers in Iran serve at the pleasure of the shah. The shah had the power to appoint and dismiss prime ministers. Mosaddegh refused to step down when dismissed. In effect, Mosaddegh sought to stage a coup against the rightful head of state, which is why intelligence officer Kermit Roosevelt called his narrative of subsequent events Countercoup.

Roosevelt, too, bears some responsibility for subsequent inaccuracies. In Washington, ego trumps truth, and Roosevelt, an intelligence officer, seeking to cash in on his actions placed himself front and center in historical events, exaggerating the role of the CIA and downplaying the roles of others. This isn’t to absolve the CIA, but rather to argue that the first draft of history may not be fully accurate.

Lastly, conventional wisdom often ignores the co-conspirators. The idea for the coup was British in origin, and was hatched once Mosaddegh repeatedly refused to negotiate after nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. It ignores the role of the clergy, who sided with the coup conspiracy because, as religious conservatives, they distrusted the Soviet-leaning Mosaddegh. This is why, the shah in his memoirs, spoke of the red (communists) vs. the black (clergy). It was also part of the irony surrounding Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s 2000 apology to the Islamic Republic for the coup because, in effect, she was apologizing to America’s co-conspirators who were happy to feign grievance for their own advantage.

Now, however, there is another resource to examine the run-up and execution of the coup. The U.S. State Department’s Office of the Historian has released a volume of Foreign Relations of the United States including key documents leading up to and immediately after the coup. “Iran, 1951-1954” is downloadable, here. The Truman and Eisenhower administrations certainly were not angels when it came to Iran, but reading the original documents can be a useful corrective to agenda-driven journalists, academics, and diplomats. The released documents add context to some of the debates and events leading up to what would become a watershed moment in Iranian history.

The post Understanding the 1953 Iran Coup appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

All of these debates about NATO and Europe are important but what they tend to miss the rapid growth of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), an alliance of autocracies and flawed democracies, which are at best non-aligned and at worst anti-American.

The SCO formed in June 2001 under the leadership of China and Russia. Original members also included Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. Mongolia, Iran, Afghanistan, and Belarus all have observer status. Iran is on the verge of joining as a full member. As Turkey has pulled away from Europe and democracy, its leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan has also hinted that Turkey might instead look to a future within the SCO.

What should worry U.S. officials is that both India and Pakistan joined the SCO last week, an event which attracted scarcely any mention at all in mainstream Washington press. That Pakistan might want to side with China and Russia is no surprise. And, given Pakistan’s support for terrorism and groups responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans, it’s getting the are partners it deserves. But India’s accession is worrisome, given its status as the world’s largest democracy, not to mention its growing weight on the world stage and the assumption among many U.S. policymakers that it is the best counterweight to Russia in the region.

The SCO may not be a formal military organization but it matters strategically. The 2005 SCO summit decision to disallow any military bases from non-SCO members forced America’s departure first from Uzbekistan and later Kyrgyzstan, two countries that had leased space to U.S. forces supporting the mission in Afghanistan. As Defense Secretary Mattis prepares a new Afghanistan strategy to prevent strategic collapse there, Pakistan’s accession to the SCO might throw a wrench into the chief logistical route for U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Behind-the-scenes Russia-Iran-Turkey dealings on Syria also presage a more active and expanded SCO.

In an ideal world, the United States would not need to be the world’s policeman and could welcome the rise of others to fill that vacuum. But when the others are Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey, the United States should be vigilant. As NATO’s malaise continues and as the European Union stumbles from one existential crisis to another, few in Washington are addressing the dark clouds gathering on the horizon.

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Qatar is about as artificial a state as they come. Historically, the Thani family that rules their kingdom absolutely were traitors: From the late 18th century, Qatar was a province of Bahrain, and the Thanis were simply governors subordinate to the Khalifas; but they split off in the 1860s. That split might have been a blip—an insignificant rebellion—had it not been for the British, who imposed a truce that essentially made Qatar its own distinct entity. Thani rule and Qatari identity, however, remain relatively recent phenomena and are not imbued with the historical permanence that many other monarchies and kingdoms enjoy.

Saudi Arabia might also make a claim on Qatar. Both regimes are Wahhabi, and Saudi Arabia has similar historic claims on the peninsula. But given Saudi expansionism throughout history, many of the other Gulf Cooperation Council countries would oppose any precedent of Saudi Arabia acquiring more territory. Indeed, when Bahrain invited Saudi forces onto the island in 2011 to quell sectarian unrest, both Bahraini’s ruling Sunnis and Kuwaitis worried that Saudi rhetoric about confederation might undercut the independence of the tiny emirates and monarchies and spark a broader proxy war throughout the region.

Qatar also has a long history with the United Arab Emirates (UAE). While visitors to the UAE might think of it as a unified country, it is very much a confederation of seven separate emirates, the best known of which are Dubai and Abu Dhabi (the others are Sharjah, Ajman, Umm al-Quwain, Fujairah, and Ras al-Khaimah). Initially, however, there was much discussion about Qatar joining the union. Ultimately, it did not, but the Qatari ruling family isn’t all that different from those of any of the other emirates; the only difference is that Qatar chose independence and then got lucky with gas fields.

It’s not the place of the United States to erase other countries; indeed, while critics of U.S. policy often say the United States fights wars for oil, the most common (but not only) factor bringing the United States into wars beginning with World War II is one country’s seeking to annex other countries by force. Still, the longer the Qataris dig in their heels and refuse to stop financing extremism, the more people in the region will question the basis of Qatar as an independent entity. It won’t be long before those same states leading the blockade of Qatar start to ask whether the region and the world would have been a better place with Qatar as the eighth United Arab Emirate. That’s certainly not on the table now, and Qatar may believe that Turkish or perhaps Iranian support will be enough to blunt the Arab action. But the longer Doha allows the crisis to play out, the more intractable the debate may become and the more unpredictable the outcomes. More than a week into the crisis, Qatari authorities should be very cautious about how far they want to escalate because they may not fully understand how great the stakes may become.

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…Trump is [not] pursuing a carefully considered strategy that utilizes a whole-of-government approach. The president should have been pressing Qatar to mend its ways behind-the-scenes, rather than professing eternal friendship in a meeting with Qatar’s emir and then blowing up on Twitter.

That may be right, but the problem is less the president blowing up on Twitter than U.S. authorities falling too easily into the diplomatic niceties of professing eternal friendship. The simple fact is that Qatar supports destabilizing, radical movements across the region. Egyptians complain about Qatari money propping up the most radical Islamist factions in Libya, let alone the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt itself. In Syria, Qatar again acts as banker to the Islamic State alongside Turkey which acts as the group’s logistician. Qatar also props up Hamas, giving it both diplomatic protection and a line of credit which the Muslim Brotherhood offshoot uses to great effect. To negotiate with Qatar implies legitimacy to Qatar’s actions when, in reality, Qatar only has two choices: Fund Islamism or stop its nonsense.

Sure, Qatar is taking a huge financial hit. Qatar Airlines has gone, in a week, from one of the most popular international airlines to possibly facing bankruptcy. The 2022 FIFA World Cup is in doubt. Many Qatar stocks are in decline. That’s good. Terror support should carry a risk.

As for the United States, many officials worry about the future of the U.S. presence at the Al-Udeid Air Base. Here, the Pentagon shouldn’t confuse the trees for the forest. For a decade or more, Qatar has interpreted the U.S. presence as an insurance policy to enable it to avoid accountability for the worst excesses of its leadership. While U.S. authorities would like to maintain a presence there, the Al Udeid outpost should not override the broader goal of defeating extremism.

The fact of the matter is that countries like Egypt, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates are only doing what successive U.S. administrations have demanded: cracking down on extremism. The Qatar move does not come in isolation. Many of the same states have also designated Hezbollah to be a terror organization, a move demanded by U.S. diplomats under both Republican and Democratic administrations. For decades, U.S. authorities have rightly dismissed Arab diplomacy as ineffective and more comfortable with talk than action. That trend is ending. Moderate Arab states may long have turned a blind eye to terror, but they recognize that the region has paid a heavy price in terms of radicalization and blowback. It’s an epiphany long overdue. Rather than undercut its momentum, we should support the anti-Qatar action, celebrate those behind it, and undercut countries like Turkey, Pakistan, and Iran that are running to Qatar’s defense.

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The American Friends Service Committee, the advocacy arm of the Quakers, for example, pay lip service to Quaker notions of non-violence Yet, in the 1970s, they somehow convinced themselves that the Khmer Rouge was a force for justice. Today, they see Hamas through rose-tinted glasses.

Former Irish President-turned-UN Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson’s “World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance” became an orgy of anti-Semitism and anti-Western polemic.

In 2009, Robert Bernstein, a founder of Human Rights Watch, took to the New York Times to lament how the organization over which he had presided for two decades had gone so far off the rails:

Human Rights Watch had as its original mission to pry open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms and support dissenters. But recently it has been issuing reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict that are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state. At Human Rights Watch, we always recognized that open, democratic societies have faults and commit abuses. But we saw that they have the ability to correct them — through vigorous public debate, an adversarial press and many other mechanisms that encourage reform. That is why we sought to draw a sharp line between the democratic and nondemocratic worlds, in an effort to create clarity in human rights. We wanted to prevent the Soviet Union and its followers from playing a moral equivalence game with the West and to encourage liberalization by drawing attention to dissidents like Andrei Sakharov, Natan Sharansky and those in the Soviet gulag — and the millions in China’s laogai, or labor camps. When I stepped aside in 1998, Human Rights Watch was active in 70 countries, most of them closed societies. Now the organization, with increasing frequency, casts aside its important distinction between open and closed societies.

More recently, both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have gone so far as to incorporate material supplied to them by a front organization for a designated al-Qaeda financier. And, while the human rights situation in Egypt is bad, for example, the Human Rights Watch executive director seems to calculate the number of alleged rights violations based on personal pique rather than any objective standard. Of course, what private organizations may do is nothing compared to how the United National Human Rights Council has disgraced itself.

Aaron Rhodes, president of the Forum for Religious Freedom Europe, has penned a masterful academic article, “Human rights concepts in the OSCE region: changes since the Helsinki Final Act,” in the Central Asian Survey. He gives a broad overview of the evolution of human rights advocacy and traces its leap to “An expansive, ‘post-modern’ vision of human rights de-emphasized the protection of basic individual freedoms, while expanding global regulation.”

With the end of the Cold War, the international community more strongly embraced elements of the Soviet concept of human rights – a much broader human rights agenda than that suggested by the Helsinki Final Act. The 1993 Vienna World Conference on Human Rights resulted in consensus – essentially a political compromise – on balancing the ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ versions of human rights, attempting to resolve contradictions between the social and economic rights propounded by socialist states and the individual liberties favoured in the West. While the post–Cold War Helsinki human rights community has generally focused on individual civil and political rights, the global human rights movement has moved towards collective, social and economic rights, embracing an expansive vision of freedom as dependent on positive state actions, not simply state restraint. There has also been a trend towards restricting fundamental freedoms in deference to the goals of tolerance and community values.

The whole article is worth reading. The granularity with which Rhodes deals with the evolution of human rights advocacy away from individual freedom and liberty and in conformity with greater political advocacy is impressive. Indeed, many young human rights activists may not consciously realize how much damage they now do to the legacy of the Helsinki Accords and traditional human rights work when they conflate their own political biases with causes of social or class justice.

If they truly hope to advance rather than damage the cause of university liberty and freedom, groups l like American Friends Service Committee, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International must engage in some serious introspection.

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Ministers confirmed the proposed legislation had been approved by a cabinet committee, allowing it to move on to parliament. Some 17.5 percent of Israel’s population are Arab. Public signs and government services are typically in Hebrew as well as Arabic and it was unclear whether the new bill would change that…. However, Haaretz said the most recent version of the bill would not subordinate democracy to Israel’s Jewish character, unlike previous versions. Parliament member Ayman Odeh, who heads the mainly Arab Joint List alliance, said approving the bill would mean trampling on minority rights, adding it would “legally transform us into second-class citizens.”

Personally, I see no reason to downgrade Arabic in this manner—many languages are spoken in Israel and many Arabs are proud citizens of the Jewish state. Nonetheless, the complaints about the change seem hypocritical, especially when lodged by outside diplomats.

After all, it has only been eight years since the U.S. Agency for International Development, using $20 million of American taxpayer money, sought to strip Hebrew from signs in the West Bank. From the Associated Press in 2009:

The US international aid agency says Palestinian authorities in the West Bank have started replacing Israeli-installed road signs bearing Hebrew script with new signs in just Arabic and English. The move is in preparation for a future Palestinian state. Howard Sumka, of USAID, says the American-funded project is expected to take up to four years and cost about $20 million.

Put aside the fact that it is silly to spend money on such things as new signage for the Palestinian state before Palestinian leaders have made the compromises necessary for the creation of that state. To spend taxpayer money to eradicate Hebrew in any future Palestinian state simply sets back the cause of tolerance and undercuts the economic integration to which diplomats and Palestinians authorities pay lip service.

Morocco provides signs in Arabic, French, and Tamazight (Berber), even in areas where Berbers is seldom spoken. Iraq treats Kurdish as an official language even in areas where Arabic predominates. Israel and Arab areas of the West Bank and Gaza should likewise promote linguistic tolerance by ensuring both Hebrew and Arabic facilities exist. U.S. policy, at least under the Obama administration, promoted linguistic intolerance. To remain silent then and complain now about the Knesset’s language bill promotes not tolerance but hypocrisy.

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But 100 days into his term, President Trump has been far more conventional than many dared hope. Many of his promises, from labeling China a currency manipulator to staying out of Syria to making nice with Russia, appear to be on hold — which should surprise no one. Consider each recent president and contrast the candidate with the man in office: George H.W. Bush promised a more “realist” global posture than Ronald Reagan but ended up proclaiming a “new world order.” Bill Clinton rejected that, insisting it was “the economy, stupid,” but ended his tenure with his secretary of state arguing that the United States is “the indispensable power.” George W. Bush promised a more “humble” presidency but after 9/11 invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, inaugurating a far-from-humble “freedom agenda” to promote democracy in the Middle East. Barack Obama promised to “end this war” in Iraq and wrap up the conflict with the Taliban, but joined NATO in invading Libya, recommitted troops to Iraq after withdrawing them, continued the war in Afghanistan and sent Special Operations forces and others to Syria and Yemen. In short, the foreign policy promises of presidential candidates are rarely gospel. The world has a way of upending even the best-laid campaign platforms.

Is Trump, however, just a manager, reacting to events rather than proactively placing his own philosophical stamp upon them? Clearly, that is not the case: He may have deferred action of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Paris Climate Agreement, but he did kill the Trans-Pacific Partnership and, while his wall remains unfunded and unbuilt, he has changed the permissive attitude toward illegal immigration that predominated under his predecessors.

If there is a philosophical stamp when it comes to foreign policy, then, what is it? Trump rhetoric is often as contradictory as his actions and labels are not easy. After all, Trump has declared himself both “a nationalist and a globalist.”

Last month, the New York Times speculated that Trump’s views—or at least those of his aide Stephen Bannon—were shaped by The Fourth Turning, a 1997 book that argued that there are 80-year cycles of prosperity and catastrophe. The New York Times explained:

The book delineates history into four seasonal cycles, or “turnings”: growth, maturation, decay, and destruction. It is the kind of wild, provocative idea that Mr. Bannon loves. But it is also just the kind of thinking that his opponents see as evidence that he is too Machiavellian and idiosyncratic for the job of President Trump’s chief strategist.

The basis of his worldview—which has been described as everything from Leninist to alt-right, an extremist fringe movement associated with white nationalism—is still shrouded in mystery and conjecture. But by his own telling, much of the foundation for his political beliefs can be found in the book, which predicts that America is hurtling toward a crisis on par with the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression. And the grim future that the book foresees helps explain the underpinnings of the president’s conservative, nationalist “America First” agenda, one that Mr. Bannon has played a large role in shaping.

Put aside the snark—Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah, a fourteenth-century masterpiece that is part of the canon Middle Eastern historians read—likewise articulates natural cycles of history. The questions are first whether Bannon really shapes Trump’s vision and whether The Fourth Turning really explains Trump’s policy.

Unmentioned by the New York Times and probably unread by either Trump or Bannon is another book that seems to fit Trump’s thinking. In 2011, anthropologist and Naval Postgraduate School professor Anna Simons coauthored The Sovereignty Solution with Joe McGraw and Duane Lauchengco, two U.S. Special Forces officers. Their goal was to outline a U.S. foreign policy that would ensure order and security in the world without overextending the U.S. military in far-flung policing and nation-building exercises.

They emphasize the importance of sovereignty and accountability in international relations. If a Belgian conducts a terrorist attack against Americans, the government of Belgium would likely assist the United States in bringing that suspect to justice. Washington should demand no less of Iran or Saudi Arabia and would only act when those governments do not undertake the responsibility of their own sovereignty. Gone, however, is the notion of democratization or transformational diplomacy: It is not for the United States to tell Turkey, Russia, or the Philippines, how to act.

Whatever one thinks of such recommendations, but they are born honestly out of the experience of those who have seen combat first hand and the failures of over-extension. Their prescriptions go beyond traditional debates of neoconservatism, liberal internationalism, or realism.

There may be much to agree or disagree with in The Sovereignty Solution, but it is perhaps the best book out there to act as a framework for the Trumpian worldview. Sometimes, there is order in seeming chaos.

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An Egyptian American charity worker who was imprisoned in Cairo for three years and became the global face of Egypt’s brutal crackdown on civil society returned home to the United States late Thursday after the Trump administration quietly negotiated her release. President Trump and his aides worked for several weeks with Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi to secure the freedom of Aya Hijazi, 30, a U.S. citizen, as well as her husband, Mohamed Hassanein, who is Egyptian, and four other humanitarian workers.

The logic behind the article goes like this: Whereas President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry sought to bash Egypt, unsuccessfully seeking to compel the release of an unjustly imprisoned American with sanctions, Trump was wise to establish a positive working relationship with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. It was the quiet diplomacy coupled with symbolic acts such as welcoming Sisi to the White House, which led the Egyptian leader to change his mind.

Here’s the problem with that logic: By extending it slightly, then it becomes wise for President Obama to ransom U.S. hostages in Iran or for Presidents Clinton and Bush to offer concessions to North Korea to compel the release American prisoners there. It is crucial not to create a precedent by which any country expects rewards for the arrest of Americans it should never have arrested in the first place.

There is also evidence that contradicts the evolving narrative. The State Department constantly tells families of victims to maintain their silence in order to allow quiet diplomacy to work. This has not worked in the case of Bob Levinson, detained in Iran and still held despite Obama and Kerry’s ransom payment. Conversely, the Bush administration’s withholding of over $100 million in aid and assistance helped compel former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to release Saad Eddin Ibrahim, and Egyptian-American sociologist who his regime had detained on spurious charges.

The simple fact is this: Transitions provide a face-saving opportunity to resolve problems if not reboot relations. American hostages returned from Iran on the day of Ronald Reagan’s swearing in because the transition provided an excuse to do so. In the case of Hijazi, her detention was a mistake. There was no evidence to support the charges leveled against her. Egypt can say the dismissal of her case was proof that its judicial system works but, even had she been convicted, Sisi might have pardoned her. The key is not, depending on the political party, Trump’s wisdom and Obama’s idiocy or the reverse. Trump seized an opportunity that the transition enabled. Sometimes, it’s as simple as that.

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The debate about the coup was vociferous here at COMMENTARY and, more broadly, across the U.S. foreign policy community. Both sides made valid arguments, but they basically boiled down to two points: Those who opposed the coup argued that, as bad as Morsi might have been, he should have been allowed to hang himself with a rope of his own making. If he crossed so many Egyptians, they would have the opportunity to vote him out of office during the next elections. Supporters of the coup—myself reluctantly included—argued that Morsi had demonstrated disdain for the democratic process and that it was becoming increasingly unlikely that he would ever allow another fair election.

In the wake of the coup, the Obama administration’s policy toward Egypt was confused. President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry were, at best, weak and ambivalent in any condemnation. Subsequently, however, they slighted the Egyptian leader and, despite Egypt being America’s largest Arab ally, downgraded military ties and stopped military aid to Egypt.

This was counterproductive on a number of fronts. First, the purpose is unclear: Morsi will not return to power and Sisi subsequently won an election. Second, Egypt and the United States are not alone in the sandbox: Russia is more than willing to step in at the expense of American influence. Thirdly, the security threats Egypt faces are not the result of the crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood but rather are pre-existing, especially in the Sinai. To cut off Egypt’s means to defend itself against al-Qaeda and Islamic State affiliates is to gamble with the lives of 90 million people and a country that controls the Suez Canal–one of the world’s strategic chokepoints. The Washington Institute’s David Schenker is always worth reading on Egypt, and his analysis of the security challenges is right-on.

There is an irony to so many progressives prioritizing the Israel-Palestinian peace process yet seeking simultaneously to ostracize Egypt. There simply cannot be any lasting solution without Egypt’s input and security guarantees. Individuals need not necessarily like either Sisi or Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but establishing trust between the Israeli and Egyptian leader is crucial given all the security issues at play. Sisi’s presence—and the establishment of trust between Jerusalem and Cairo—opens a number of doors on the peace process and is also crucial to preventing the further establishment of Iranian influence in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.

Make no mistake: the human rights concerns are real, although prominent advocacy groups like Human Rights Watch have delegitimized themselves by showing their numbers in Egypt are based more on their executive director’s pique than on any scientific surveying. Across the region as well, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have partnered with radical groups to push a political agenda that has very little to do with human rights and everything to do with its employees’ partisan worldview.

Trump may not bring up human rights with Sisi, but the Egyptian leader risks enclosing himself in a bubble of sycophancy if he continues to crack down on the Egyptian press. Transparency is also essential in business. Longtime Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak delayed making the tough decisions and undercut opportunities for ordinary Egyptians as he privileged a military oligarchy. Should that repeat, the Egyptian people might again turn on the state. The State Department should not cease to advocate liberalization, but diplomacy isn’t about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

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In recent years, MESA has become infatuated with the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. While it has yet to formally endorse BDS, it is currently in the process of amending its bylaws to enable it to do so. If MESA endorses BDS, at a minimum it will provide academic coverage for universities across North America to exclude their Israeli counterparts from conferences, academic and political debate, and discussion. Bans may also enable university departments to discriminate against Israelis—something that is, of course, all too common at universities across the Middle East—and could also lead university departments to bar those studying the Jewish state from dissertation, travel, and research grants. In short, an academic organization adopting BDS is anathema to academic discourse and freedom.

It’s against this backdrop that I have received two letters from MESA in the time since President Donald Trump signed his executive order temporarily pausing entry of citizens of seven countries for which the United States did not believe it had adequate security cooperation or ability to vet effectively.

The first, from January 29, declared:

MESA strongly condemns the Executive Order limiting the entry of Middle Eastern refugees and immigrants to the U.S. and urges the President and Congress to lift the ban. The ban impedes the mission of the Middle East Studies Association, which is to bring together scholars, educators, and those interested in the study of the region from all over the world.

It further announced the creation of a “Task Force on Civil and Human Rights.”

That was followed up on February 6, in a statement noting that, within MESA, “there have been calls to move this year’s MESA meeting from Washington DC to outside the country to accommodate those who might not be able to enter the U.S. or choose not to do so out of protest.” Beth Baron, the current MESA president and a professor at the City University of New York (CUNY), and Judith Tucker, the president-elect and professor at Georgetown University, assured members that:

MESA is the November meeting. But it is much more. It is the Committee on Academic Freedom, which continues to issue chilling letters. It is the new Task Force on Civil and Human Rights, which is tracking federal legislation impacting our membership. And it is a community of scholars dedicated to critical exchange of knowledge on a region, its people, and their rights, in the U.S. and abroad.

Whether one supports the ban or is against it or takes the perspective that it was a reasonable idea poorly implemented, there are easily observed hypocrisies and ironies to MESA’s umbrage.

First, MESA hardly lifts a finger to condemn the almost total ban among many states—including those subject to Trump’s proposed ban—regarding Israelis. Such bans affect Israelis or dual Israel citizens studying in America universities. This is important given the proliferation of U.S. college campuses in Arab states. Several Arab states demand a statement of religion on visa applications as well, a request intended to enable the exclusion of Jews.

Second, Gulf News reported in 2011 that Kuwait had banned citizens of five majority Muslim countries. The Kuwaiti government denies that this ban is in effect now but, even if it was temporary, did MESA react? No.

Most ironic, however, is that MESA appears ready to embrace if not endorse BDS—effectively banning Israeli scholars and students and denying access to Israel with university grants—and yet opposes Trump’s ban. That shows that intellectual consistency—something in which academics should take pride—is absent among MESA’s leadership and probably the vast majority of its membership which now unapologetically places politics above scholarship.

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Israel, of course, isn’t alone. In the waning days of the 2008 presidential campaign, Russia invaded Georgia, the only democratic country in the Caucasus and a country which had also virtually eradicated endemic corruption. Senator John McCain’s statement addressed the crisis with moral clarity, while then-Senator Barack Obama’s remarks calling for both “Georgia and Russia to show restraint” were diplomatic pabulum that obscured the aggressor and victim.

Neither the hostility toward Israel nor the cavalier attitude toward Georgia comes close to being the most egregious example of senior U.S. officials confusing betrayal of democracy with sophisticated diplomacy. According to Taiwanese news sources citing Wikileaks, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton seemed to support the idea of the United States betraying Taiwan to China in exchange for Beijing writing off American debt. According to Taiwan News:

According to an alleged e-mail by Hillary Clinton published by WikiLeaks, the former United States Secretary of State was willing to discuss a New York Times editorial calling on Washington to ditch Taiwan in return for China writing off debt. Her adviser Jake Sullivan passed on the editorial to Clinton, and she replied, “I saw it and thought it was so clever. Let’s discuss,” according to WikiLeaks. The editorial, titled “To Save Our Economy, Ditch Taiwan” … was written by Paul Kane, a former international security fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. In the piece, the author says President Barack Obama “should enter into closed-door negotiations with Chinese leaders to write off the $1.14 trillion of American debt currently held by China in exchange for a deal to end American military assistance and arms sales to Taiwan and terminate the current United States-Taiwan defense arrangement by 2015.” The proposal would benefit the U.S. in that it would cut its debt, improve its economy, and keep it out of a potential war with China over Taiwan, Kane wrote.

While the leaked documents do not give the outcome of any discussion that occurred between Clinton and Sullivan, the very notion that Clinton would consider betraying a country of 23 million to a one-party, communist regime is worth considering. To even float a trial balloon could have devastating consequences. When Secretary of State Dean Acheson defined America’s “defense perimeters” in Asia on January 12, 1950, he omitted Korea. North Korean leader Kim Il-sung interpreted that speech to mean the United States would not defend South Korea: More than 36,000 Americans died and nearly three times that number were wounded. Nor would it project American strength if the United States were to choose to betray allies rather than rein in spending. The icing on the cake, of course, was the subsequent self-congratulations about the ‘bold move’ for Clinton’s successor John Kerry to visit Cuba, all the while continuing to avoid Taiwan.

During the Cold War, liberals and progressives castigated the U.S. government for overthrowing supposedly socialist regimes in Chile, Guatemala, and elsewhere. President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State likewise withdrew formal diplomatic recognition from Taiwan (which at the time had yet to solidify its democracy). Those arguments, however, lose all merit when–absent the straight jacket of Cold War realism–Democrats repeatedly betray or even consider betraying democracies for spurious reasons.

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