Michael Totten has some advice for president-elect Trump
It can be boiled down to reverse the Obama doctrine*.
Totten doesn’t say that—not exactly, anyway. But his final paragraph indicates it:
All this advice is based on one simple principle””you reward your friends and punish your enemies. It’s the first rule of foreign policy, one that has been with us since antiquity and will survive until the end of time. Presidents who behave as though this rule doesn’t apply to them are as doomed to fail in foreign policy as rocket scientists who ignore gravity. Hubristically declaring that it would not do “stupid shit” like its predecessors, the Obama administration flipped this rule on its head over and over again””with Israel, with Russia, with Iran, and with Turkey””with disastrous results every time.
So turn things around. Again: Reward your friends and punish your enemies. Tattoo that rule on the back of your eyelids if you have to.
Please read the whole thing.
I actually think Trump has the anti-Obama Doctrine principle down pretty well. It’s the details and the execution that’s hard, and all those black swans that threaten to arrive on the scene.
[*NOTE: I can’t say for sure, but I actually believe I may have been the first one to use the phrase “Obama Doctrine” for Obama’s tendency to stroke enemies and kick allies. I first used it in this post from September of 2009.]
I know one thing, Trump won’t be bowing to anybody. He’ll offer a hand, straight and tall, like a man.
Re: some assertions by Totten;
“You are not battling a Hitler or Hirohito that you can bomb into submission. Nor are you facing down a Stalinist empire that you can outspend into oblivion.”
Why can we not bomb Iran? Why can we not face the inherent truth of Islam and hold it accountable?
“You and the citizens whom you have been elected to serve are beset instead by a constellation of problems–international terrorism, rogue states, and a renascent expansionist Russia.”
Why can we not declare that a State’s support for terrorism is a casus belli for military action?
Why can we not restrain an expansionist Russia by restoring our military with the implicit consequential threat that presents Putin?
And Totten fails to mention the threat of a militant China…
It’s true that the Middle East cannot be democratized, nor is regime change a panacea.
But there is another “tool” at our disposal. That tool cannot emerge until we face up to why “if we flush the terrorists of ISIS out of their nests and vaporize them with Predator drones… they will indeed “pop up again in some other unstable and anarchic part of the world.”
That reality only exists because we refuse to face the source of radical Islamic terrorism, which is Islam’s fundamental orthodoxy. That fundamental orthodoxy is why Islam cannot reform itself and why jihad in all its forms, periodically arises.
Until we face up to islam’s inherent nature, Islam’s proxy arms of aggression will continue to pop up. Once we face it, then we can hold Islam’s ideology itself accountable. See; “Islam : an Empirical Crisis for the West”
“No more “resets” or “bromances.” Vladimir Putin is not your friend. He is implacably hostile to the U.S. and Europe for one simple reason. He recoils from the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe, just as we would have done had the Soviet Union won the Cold War and expanded the Warsaw Pact to Brussels and Amsterdam.”
Totten is IMO, absolutely correct in this but incomplete in that Putin also wants to return Russia to its world power status. Putin’s fear of NATO is, in principle… easily resolved. Recognize and acknowledge Putin’s concern. Kiev is 550 miles from Moscow. So create a ‘neutral buffer zone’.
Devise a treaty whose provisions state that the West will NOT seek to make any nation that borders Russia a NATO member… provided that Russia respects the buffer zone nation’s neutrality. This serves Russia’s national interests by giving Russia, a security it can count on.
As for Putin’s desire to restore Russia’s world power status, it’s not going to happen as long as Russia’s governance remains corrupt because corruption hamstrings entrepreneurial development.
As for the Kurds, I too perceive the Kurds to be the only indigenous force that can be relied upon to fight ISIS. I agree that they should have their own State as they’ve both earned it and have a right to self-determination. I agree that “Iraq should probably split into three states–Kurdish, Sunni, and Shia.”
But I don’t think Totten goes far enough when he mentions that “Turkey hates the very idea of an independent Kurdistan.” The day that the US engineers an independent Kurdistan is the day when Turkey becomes America’s active enemy. Erdogan doesn’t share our values domestically, he is not on our side geopolitically and he dreams of a restored Ottoman Empire.
Getting our nukes out of Turkey is a no-brainer, as a maddened Erdogan would seize them. And once Erdogan decides that America is Turkey’s enemy, I think it likely that he’ll start his pursuit of nuclear weapons capability.
Though if we allow Iran to attain nuclear weapons capability, it will just be a matter of time till the entire M.E. goes nuclear.
A ‘proactive, calculated’ foreign policy should be Trump’s byword but given his isolationism, I’m not hopeful.
I think the premise is wrong. Barack Hussein Obama did indeed punish his enemies and rewarded his friends. He was not doing “stupid shit.” He is not stupid, but as far as America is concerned, he is a shit.
Frog,
No argument as to Obama’s punishing his domestic enemies and rewarding his accomplices.
But the assertion that his foreign policy was designed to punish America is more problematic. There is a real possibility that he actually believed that well intentioned words backed by actions, which demonstrate a non-beligerency… could solve all disagreements, once those opposed to America were convinced that it was “under new management”. Indeed I suspect he still believes that had he only had more time, all such disagreements could have been solved diplomatically.
I suspect he’s still convinced that it is America’s prior intransigence and bullying that prevents the trust needed to breakthrough set positions.
Obama long ago drank the left’s kool-aid, indeed he imbibed it in his mother’s milk.
Frog:
The “stupid shit” reference is a reference to something the Obama administration used to say—that their goal was to not do “stupid shit” like Bush.
See this.
As far as the friends/enemies thing goes, the reference is not to who Obama thinks of as enemies and friends, it’s to traditional enemies and friends of the US. The irony in the “Obama Doctrine” designation is that of course he seemed to reverse the traditional friends/enemies distinctions.
I confess to be an armchair geopolitical ‘mastermind’. After 9/11/01 I thought the logical place to start was Saudi Arabia and the other oil shiekdoms, including Iran. Blockade them and watch them fall to their knees as they begin to starve. They can not survive without food and technology imports. But I am just an armchair geopolitical ‘mastermind’.
IMO one of the best things djt can do is to push for expansion of our naval forces and upgrading our nuclear arsenal. I happen to agree with djt that our NATO allies need to bring their defense spending up to the agreed 2% of GDP. Only a handful live up to that standard.
All we can do is wait and see what Trump will do in 2017.
The Saudi’s support for stealth jihad is primarily a means to placate their very powerful Wahhabists. The Saudi royal family’s survival literally depends upon keeping that faction quiescent.
That dynamic also applies to the other ME kingdoms. Keeping the Imams happy is a necessity not an option.
Blockading the ME kingdoms and Iran would cut off 1/3 of the world’s oil supply, which would almost certainly precipitate a collapse of the West’s financial system.
Blockading the ME nations would thus be counter productive. More importantly, it would miss the target, which other than Iran is not the government leadership but the religious authorities, i.e. the Imams and Mullahs. Targeting the source from which Islamic terrorism springs is the only way to stop Islam’s aggression. Islam itself must be held accountable and consequences and reprisals must be directly targeted at the source.
Islam’s Imams and Mullahs are the point of leverage, the fulcrum upon which Islam itself can be moved. The promise of paradise must be invalidated by using their own dogma against them. Specifically, an unclean Muslim cannot enter paradise. A tactic already proven by Pershing in the Phillipines in the early 1900s…
While Islam will not risk its holy sites survival, which must be held hostage to Muslims themselves ending Islamic terrorism by withdrawing their condoning of it.
GB,
Do you think the West could not survive at the most 6 months without ME oil? That is all it would take. Follow the money. The imans and mullahs need money to proselytize their death cult message. Otherwise they are usless mouths to feed when children are hungry.
Siege is a potent and ancient tactic. I favor the old ways.
“He recoils from the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe, just as we would have done had the Soviet Union won the Cold War and expanded the Warsaw Pact to Brussels and Amsterdam.”
Um, er, what’s wrong with this contention”…
(Heh..)
This expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe was more a symbolic jesture than a real thing: no real boots on the ground. This provoked Russian leadership fury and paranoia without giving potential victims of this paranoia actual means to defend themselves or providing them with credible deterrence. If you chose to poke a bear in the eye you must at least have a sutable weapon on ready to deflect its charge.
And this was, indeed, a stupid shit, like go to war in Iraq without thought-out strategy of ending this war and securing its results. It seems that all USA foreign policy is based on unrealistic assumptions about how external world operates and what can be done with it – under any USA administration.
Sergey has the right of it.
How would we have reacted if Mexico or another Latin American country had joined the Warsaw Pact back during the cold war.
Well, we did react. Look to the Cuban Missile crisis of 1962 for an example. We almost went to nuclear war over that one.
Expanding NATO into Eastern Europe was indeed some “stupid shit”. I believe it is only because of the relative weakness of Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union that saved us from a much more hostile reaction – possibly even a shooting war.
Russia under Putin is not our friend, but they are not our enemy either.
parker,
Perhaps the West could but I’m doubtful. That said, once we established energy independence and, they just announced a revised estimate of a huge oil shale deposit in Texas/NM… then I would be in favor of a blockade IF it was an additional means of placing pressure on Islam.
Siege is indeed a potent and ancient tactic. But be prepared for the left to resist mightily. Just as they did with Bush.
Sergey,
“It seems that all USA foreign policy is based on unrealistic assumptions about how external world operates and what can be done with it — under any USA administration.”
There is some truth to that, since Reagan there has been no American administration that combined a clear strategic goal with pragmatic tactics.
Roy,
Yes.