The American Conservative

America’s low turnout. Adam Taylor compares America’s relatively low election turnout even in a presidential year to voting in other countries around the world.

Here is what Trump’s foreign policy should be. Doug Bandow describes the foreign policy he would like Trump to have.

Inside Gen. Flynn’s brain. Tom Ricks republished a speech by Michael Flynn from last year that lays out some of his foreign policy and national security views.

Trump’s transition team struggles to fill national security jobs. Kimberly Dozier and Shane Harris report on the difficulties Trump’s camp is encountering in finding people willing to serve in his administration.

Derek Davison also worries that the nuclear deal with Iran is in danger:

But whether President Trump outright tears up the deal or simply orders his administration to take punitive actions against Iran, which could well cause Tehran to tear it up, the end result may be the same: goodbye to the nuclear deal. Trump’s insistence that he can “negotiate a better deal” notwithstanding, the probable result would be an Iran with no more restraints on its nuclear program and a United States with little international capital to spend on trying to rebuild the sanctions regime that led to the negotiations. In a broader sense, for the U.S. to take steps to scuttle the deal now may also tarnish America’s reputation as a reliable partner in international negotiations.

Trump’s rhetoric about seeking a better deal has created the impression that he won’t wreck the existing agreement, but the attempt to extract more concessions from Iran risks blowing up the accord because Tehran is not realistically going to give up any more than they already have. This was why our negotiators accepted the minimal compromises that they did. Iran wasn’t going to agree to abandoning their nuclear program all together, and any “renegotiation” premised on the goal of forcing total capitulation is doomed before it begins.

The parallel here is with the Agreed Framework with North Korea: the Bush administration believed they could coerce North Korea into accepting more demands, and instead caused the collapse of the old agreement, North Korea withdrew from the NPT, and soon thereafter they began conducting nuclear tests. The drive in Congress to impose more sanctions on Iran in the misguided belief that this will force Iran to yield even more on the nuclear issue seems certain to blow up in Washington’s face. But then the goal of most deal opponents has never been to secure a “better deal” at all, but simply to sabotage a diplomatic resolution of the issue in order to keep it as a pretext for conflict.

The danger in all this is that Trump clearly doesn’t understand what the nuclear deal does, and he doesn’t grasp that it is doing exactly what it is intended to do. His talking-point complaint about the money that the U.S. “gave” Iran as part of the deal is a case in point: he derides the deal for sanctions relief that always had to be forthcoming in the event that the nuclear issue was resolved, and he pretends that the money Iran is gaining access to wasn’t theirs all along. He looks at a successful negotiation and a big win for the U.S. and its allies and sees nothing but disaster. That tells me that he doesn’t know what a good deal looks like. The fact that he has also pledged on at least one occasion to “dismantle” the agreement and told the AIPAC conference this would be his “number-one priority” tells us that we should assume the worst.

Hostility from Congress and lack of support from the next administration are likely to put the nuclear deal in jeopardy:

Deal skeptics on Capitol Hill have already prepared a raft of bills that have a far better chance of making it into law with the threat of a White House veto now out of the way. But the president-elect himself can just as easily send what he’s called a “disastrous” deal to the dustbin of history by simply refusing to sign off on sanctions relief [bold mine-DL].

“That’s why I find it so hard to believe that the deal survives,” said Richard Nephew, a former State Department sanctions official who now heads the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. “At some point, [Trump] will have to make an affirmative decision to support its implementation.”

The danger here isn’t just that Trump has repeatedly denounced the deal as one of the worst ever made and has at times vowed to “dismantle” it, but that he also has obvious political incentives to repudiate one of Obama’s signature policies. There was absolutely no Republican support in Congress for the deal, and both chambers are now under Republican control, so it will be easy enough for Trump to satisfy people in his own party and earn goodwill with hawks in Congress by helping to wreck an agreement that he has attacked many times. It would be a serious mistake for him to do this, and it would ensure that his foreign policy record starts off with a huge own-goal for the U.S. that will anger major allies, but I doubt that Trump or the people around him see it that way or care.

The Republican victory yesterday was above all a clear repudiation of Hillary Clinton and her brand of politics, and her loss marks both the end of her political career and the close of a quarter-century of a Democratic Party defined by the Clintons. It probably should not have surprised any of us that someone whose last general election victory was ten years ago would be an unusually weak national standard-bearer for her party. The Democrats’ party leaders set her up as a prohibitive favorite so far in advance that they never even seriously considered an alternative, and they tried to win their third consecutive presidential term with one of the most baggage-laden, distrusted people in American politics.

Whatever one thinks of Trump, it is a good thing for our politics that a second twenty-first century presidential dynasty was not established and that there was no chance of a Bush dynasty revival. Trump was the one to defeat both Bush and Clinton in an election that most people once assumed was certain to be between them. The humiliation of the leaders of both parties may not seem very important right now, but it is a healthy and overdue result after decades of failed and dangerous policies. I have no confidence in Trump’s foreign policy, but it was a good thing for the country and for the Democratic Party that Clinton won’t have the opportunity to put her reflexive hawkishness into action again. At the very least, the foreign policy establishment figures that were hoping for an expanded war in Syria will be disappointed for a while. The neoconservatives that threw in with her presumably won’t have any influence in the new administration, and that can only be a good thing. Unfortunately, Trump still has plenty of lousy foreign policy advisers without them.

However much support Obama appears to have right now, the result is a stinging rebuke to him. To the extent that Trump ran on issues, he ran on a comprehensive anti-Obama platform whether it was coherent or not, and he prevailed. Obama pleaded with Democratic voters to turn out to protect his legacy, and millions of them ignored his request. Trump won’t be able to reverse all of Obama’s major achievements, but he will probably be able to undo several of them starting with the nuclear deal and normalization with Cuba. In foreign policy, that just leaves Obama’s legacy of presiding over eight years of uninterrupted warfare, which so far Trump shows no sign of wanting to end.

Obama leaves his party far worse off than when he came in. That isn’t all his doing, and some losses were bound to happen after eight years in power, but it happened on his watch. Across most of the country, Democrats are shut out of power and come January will no longer control any branch of the federal government. They will be forced to rethink many things. Unfortunately for the country and the GOP, victory in 2016 will convince most Republicans that they don’t have to rethink much at all, and any chance for serious policy reform is now probably dead for another four years.

Much of what Trump will do overseas is unknown. He has taken public positions on a few issues, but he has said little or nothing about most of the world. The miserable coverage of foreign policy in this election has helped ensure that he didn’t have to.

What we do know is that Trump has surrounded himself with hard-liners and authoritarians, and he is reportedly considering some of them for top Cabinet posts. A Trump administration that includes the likes of Giuliani, Gingrich, Flynn, and Bolton will certainly not be a restrained or realist one, and we can expect increased hostility towards Iran and anyone perceived to be aligned with them. Flynn is one of Trump’s earliest foreign policy advisers, and he co-authored a book with Michael Ledeen, one of the most fanatical Iran hawks of all. He and Ledden wrote this:

We’re in a global war, facing an enemy alliance that runs from Pyongyang, North Korea, to Havana, Cuba, and Caracas, Venezuela. Along the way, the alliance picks up radical Muslim countries and organizations such as Iran, al Qaeda, the Taliban and Islamic State.

This is the delusional thinking of someone who could very well be the next Secretary of Defense.

As I mentioned earlier this week, Gingrich, Giuliani, and Bolton have all been boosters of the totalitarian cult and “former” terrorist group, Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK), which seeks to replace the current Iranian government with its cult leader. Trump has made denouncing the nuclear deal a major part of his indictment of Obama’s foreign policy, and Iran hawks in Congress will be eager to torpedo it. I have a hard time seeing Trump fighting to preserve a signature achievement of a president he loathes, and so it is more likely than not the nuclear deal is going to unravel. That will not only be a bad outcome in terms of nonproliferation, but it will also open the door to war with Iran that the deal at least temporarily closed.

One of the bigger challenges facing a Trump administration will be finding people willing to serve in it at lower levels. Many Republican foreign policy professionals have already gone on record opposing Trump’s election in the strongest terms, and it is doubtful that they would now be willing to work for him. Unlike other Republican presidents-elect, he will not be able to recruit from veterans of the last Republican administration. Since the last Republican administration was a disaster on foreign policy, that is not all bad news, but it does mean that lots of jobs are probably going to go unfilled for a while or will be filled by underqualified loyalists.

In broad strokes, a Trump foreign policy will probably be highly unilateralist, preoccupied with terrorism and Iran, and fixated mostly on the Middle East. In that sense, it won’t be as much of a radical departure as his supporters hope and his opponents fear, but it will mean continued U.S. entanglement in unnecessary wars for the foreseeable future. Our foreign policy was already overly obsessed with both terrorism and Iran and has relied on overly militarized responses, and I don’t see a Trump administration advised by the likes of Flynn and Bolton changing that anytime soon.

My predictions from last week were almost entirely wrong. The only thing I got right was that Kirk would lose in Illinois, which proved to be the exception last night. Four big faulty assumptions account for most of my error: 1) I assumed Trump had alienated too many Republicans from the 2012 coalition without drawing in more new voters, and that was evidently not the case; 2) I took for granted that his consistently lower level of support in national and state polling reflected the true extent of his support, which it did not; 3) I placed far too much importance on the “ground game” advantage that I assumed would deliver Clinton the necessary electoral votes in competitive states, and it turned out that RNC efforts were more than adequate; 4) I overestimated the importance of Obama’s approval rating, since there were obviously lots of people that turned out for Obama that didn’t do the same for Clinton. Clinton may go on to win the popular vote when all votes are counted, but in all important respects I misread the landscape about as badly as one can. I also put too much weight on Trump’s very high unfavorability rating, and I didn’t take fatigue with continued Democratic control seriously enough.

Clinton is undoubtedly one of the least appealing nominees in modern U.S. history, and there are plenty of reasons why Democratic voters wouldn’t be motivated to turn out for her, but then the same might be said about Trump. The difference is that Trump seemed to offer his supporters some possibility of breaking with the status quo, and Clinton was the embodiment of most of what is wrong with our political class. Clinton was counting on Trump’s myriad flaws to hand her the election, and most observers expected the same thing, but as the representative of the incumbent party and the political class her flaws appear to have been more important. Clinton’s sense of entitlement led to a fatal complacency on the part of her campaign and among Democratic voters in just enough states to make Trump president.

Trump deserves credit for expanding the electoral map for Republicans. He did what no Republican nominee has done in thirty years by carrying Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and he is probably going to take Michigan as well. Furthermore, he did it in the face of near-universal hostility from almost every institution and media outlet, and succeeded where the GOP leadership had repeatedly failed. I still assume he’ll be a lousy president, but this year he has proved his doubters wrong time and again.

Dan de Luce and Molly O’Toole make some very questionable claims here:

Washington has steadily lost leverage in the Syrian civil war since Obama’s about-face in August 2013. After declaring that the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime against civilians would represent a “red line,” Obama then declined to take military action against President Bashar al-Assad after he gassed his own people in the suburbs of Damascus.

That moment, which left U.S. allies bewildered and outraged, has come to define Obama’s handling of the Syrian war. Critics on the left and right say U.S. credibility writ large has been seriously damaged by the episode.

This is the conventional story of what happened, but most of it isn’t true. Most allies weren’t “bewildered” or “outraged,” and it is strange to think that they would be. Except for France, which was preparing to join in the proposed bombing, and perhaps Turkey, there was no treaty ally in the world that was disappointed by the decision not to attack. The governments that were most unhappy with the decision not to bomb were the Gulf states that hoped to get the U.S. sucked deeper into the Syrian civil war, but in that case our bad clients just wanted to get the U.S. to fight their war for them. Had the U.S. followed through with an attack on Syrian regime forces, the only ones to benefit would have been jihadist groups and the rebels that fight alongside them. For that matter, there were almost no critics on the left attacking the decision not to bomb, and almost no one outside of a small cadre of hard-liners still believes that U.S. “credibility” was damaged at all by that episode, much less seriously. No one can seriously argue that refusing to bomb Syria in 2013 had any negative effects elsewhere in the world, and the ridiculous attempts to make such arguments have all been debunked more than once.

The trouble isn’t just that these claims aren’t correct, but that they reinforce a thoroughly discredited idea that U.S. threats and promises around the world lose “credibility” if the U.S. doesn’t bomb other countries at every opportunity. This is one of the more pernicious and pervasive ideas in our foreign policy debates, and unfortunately it just won’t die. One might think that the total lack of evidence in favor of the argument would ensure its demise, but the “credibility” myth seems to thrive in the absence of any proof.

James Traub gamely tries to convince us (and himself) that Clinton’s foreign policy won’t be as aggressive and meddlesome as she says it will be, but he undermines his argument when he says this:

As a senator and later secretary of state, she rarely departed from the counsel of senior military officials. She was far more persuaded of the merits of Gen. David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal’s counterinsurgency plan for Afghanistan, which would have sent an additional 40,000 troops there, than Obama was and maybe even more than then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates was. She rarely departed from Gates on any significant issue. Of course, the one time she did so was on Libya, where she advocated intervention and he did not [bold mine-DL]. On Syria, Clinton may have to choose between her own expressed commitments and a Pentagon that is far more cautious and more inclined to see mishap than are civilian interventionists. I wonder how Kagan-esque she will be in the White House. Less so, perhaps, than she was as secretary of state.

In other words, when military officers recommended a larger escalation, she agreed with them, and when Gates didn’t support intervention she didn’t agree. Clinton was fine with advice from the military when it meant supporting deeper involvement, but she broke with Gates when he didn’t want to take sides in a foreign war. That isn’t a picture of someone who consistently heeds military advice, but rather someone who always opts for the more aggressive option available at the time. It doesn’t make much sense that Clinton as president would be less “Kagan-esque” than she was as a member of Obama’s Cabinet. As president, she will have considerable leeway to do as she sees fit, Congress will be pathetically quiescent as usual, and most of the foreign policy establishment will be encouraging her to do more in Syria and elsewhere. Clinton will be predisposed to agree with what they urge her to do, and in the last twenty years she has never seen a military intervention that she thought was unnecessary or too risky. Why is that suddenly going to change when she has the power of the presidency? In virtually every modern case, a new president ends up behaving more hawkishly than expected based on campaign rhetoric. All of the pressures and incentives in Washington push a president towards do-somethingism, and Clinton has typically been among the least resistant to the demand to “do something” in response to crises and conflicts, so why would we think she would become more cautious once she is in office? I can understand why many of her supporters wish that to be the case, but it flies in the face of all the available evidence, including most of what we know about how Washington works.

Traub makes a number of predictions at the end of his article:

She will not make dumb mistakes. She will reassure every ally who needs reassurance. She will try to mute China’s adventurism in the South China Sea without provoking a storm of nationalism. She’ll probably disappoint the neocons. She won’t go out on any limbs. She won’t shake the policymaking consensus.

I don’t know where this confidence in Clinton’s good judgment comes from, but it seems misplaced. I suppose it depends on what you think smart foreign policy looks like, but there is a fair amount of evidence from Clinton’s own record that she is quite capable of making dumb mistakes. That doesn’t just apply to her vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq and her backing for intervention in Libya, but could also refer to her support for sending weapons to Ukraine, her endorsement of “no-fly” and safe zones in Syria, her preference for more sanctions on Iran while negotiations were still taking place, and her belief that the U.S. has to bomb another country to retain its “credibility.” All of these are mistakes, and some are quite dumb.

It isn’t at all reassuring to know that Clinton will “reassure every ally who needs reassurance,” because in practice that means indulging bad behavior from reckless clients and rewarding them with more aid and weapons. Earlier in the article, Traub seems to understand that enabling the Saudis is a bad idea:

This last policy, which for Clinton will come under the heading of “alliance management,” would only deepen the violence and sectarian strife rending the region. She would be better advised to tell the Saudis that the United States will reduce its support of their war effort unless they make serious efforts toward a lasting cease-fire.

That would certainly be wiser than offering uncritical backing of their intervention, but what is the evidence that Clinton thinks U.S. support for the war on Yemen needs to be curtailed? Yemen has been devastated in no small part because of Obama’s willingness to “reassure” the Saudis and their allies. What other countries will be made to suffer so Clinton can keep them happy? Clinton may disappoint neocons, but then they are disappointed by anything short of preventive war. Even if Clinton’s foreign policy isn’t aggressive enough to satisfy them, it is likely to be far more aggressive than necessary.

David Brooks dreams of a new third party:

There has to be a compassionate globalist party, one that embraces free trade while looking after those who suffer from trade; that embraces continued skilled immigration while listening to those hurt by immigration; that embraces widening ethnic diversity while understanding that diversity can weaken social trust.

There has to be a patriotic party that understands that the world benefits when America serves as the leading and energetic superpower.

It’s not obvious that there “has to be” such a party, but if there were one what would be its constituency? A Bush-era GOP in miniature would have a very narrow popular base, not least because it would be defined by three of the things that made the Bush-era GOP leadership so unpopular with the public. Put bluntly, what does this party offer voters that they haven’t already rejected or can’t get elsewhere? I have no problem if people want to create new parties to give voters more options, but I don’t see the point in going to the trouble of creating one just to offer voters reheated Bushism. Besides, a self-consciously anti-populist party would seem to be doomed from the outset in a country in which the public’s preferences have been and continue to be ignored on some of these very same issues. Brooks’ Goldilocks positions on trade, immigration, and foreign policy might sound like a slight improvement over what we have now, but in practice we can be reasonably certain that the “compassionate globalist party” would emphasize the parts of their agenda that benefit corporate interests and would neglect the rest. We saw what “compassionate globalism” meant in the 2000s, and it was neither especially compassionate nor was it good for the U.S. or the rest of the world.

Despite predictions that 2016 would be a “foreign policy election,” foreign policy played a remarkably small role in the campaign and the presidential debates. These issues rarely came up in the general election, and the few times they did come up the treatment of them was as superficial as possible. Trump could not exploit Clinton’s weaknesses on foreign policy, and she in turn said as little about it as possible. As a result, we have completed a long campaign season with the least coverage of the candidates’ foreign policy views that I can recall for decades. Regrettably, this has happened at a time when the U.S. is in its fifteenth year of continuous warfare somewhere around the world. If ever there was a time for a serious foreign policy debate, it was during this year’s election campaign, but the incumbent party’s candidate had no interest and the opposing party’s candidate lacked the knowledge and competence to hold her and the current administration accountable.

The U.S. has been engaged in hostilities in at least one country ever since October 2001, and for most of the last decade and a half it has been fighting or aiding others’ wars in a half dozen countries or more. Not only have the major party candidates managed to evade any serious questions about their policies around the world, but they have been allowed to endorse the continuation of current war policies with virtually no questioning at all. The next president will take office as the third consecutive president to be in charge of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the second in a row to be in charge of a war in Syria. At the same time that, the U.S. is bombing or supporting the bombing of at least three other countries, and there is no reason to expect any of that to stop under the next administration. The voters have scarcely been told what the next president’s plans are for these wars, and they and their representatives have never seriously been consulted about them. Congress’ abdication of responsibility means that the new president will inherit at least one illegal war and another appalling U.S.-backed war in Yemen with no consent or input from the people’s representatives, and we are more likely than not to be stuck with a president inclined to continue or even escalate current U.S. military interventions. Presidents never have mandates for their agendas, but there is definitely no mandate for a more aggressive foreign policy. Nonetheless, that is almost certainly what we will get as a result of this largely foreign policy-free election campaign.