By Robert Tracinski
Thursday, September 15, 2016
A few years ago, I compared the state of our foreign
policy debate to the fictional country of Etchasketchistan. It is as if the
foreign policy establishment have been turned upside down and shaken, resetting
the alignments that have held since 9/11, and in some cases since the end of
World War II. You can no longer reliably predict who is going to sound like a
“realist,” a democracy-promoting “neocon,” or an “isolationist.”
This realignment—it might be more accurate to call it a
de-alignment—started with a briefly opposed and quickly abandoned U.S.
intervention in Syria. For about a week in 2013 it was the Democrats, driven in
large part by partisan support for President Obama, who sounded like
democracy-promoting hawks, and it was Republicans who talked like skeptical
anti-interventionists. I observed later that the old alignments seem to snap
back into place a little with Russia’s annexation of Crimea and de facto invasion of Eastern Ukraine,
which reminded Republicans that they are supposed to be hawks who stand up to
the Russkis.
But now we’ve got a Republican presidential nominee who likes the Russkis and their strongman
leader, so it’s time to go back to Etchasketchistan for a good shake that will
de-align everything again.
Hence, last week saw Donald Trump praising Russia’s
Vladimir Putin as a man with “very strong control over a country,” saying that
“certainly in [the Russian] system he has been a leader, far more than our
president has been a leader.”
This is reflected in a wider shift in opinions on Putin
among Republicans, driven by Trump’s example.
But worst of all is that this is being echoed and even
amplified by heretofore sober and sensible people who apparently feel they have
to run interference for their political team. Partisanship can do funny things
to your brain.
Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, drew out the
implication that he and Trump are specifically praising Putin’s domestic leadership: “I think it’s
inarguable that Vladimir Putin has been a stronger leader in his country than
Barack Obama has been in this country, and that’s going to change the day that
Donald Trump becomes president of the United States of America.” Yes, well,
that’s what we’re afraid of.
Conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt took the argument
another step farther, tweeting that Putin has done better than Barack Obama at
securing his country’s national interests.
This is a bit more extensive than Trump’s previous claims
that Putin has been more assertive on the world stage than Obama (which is not
a very high bar to clear). Hewitt draws out the further implication that Putin
has “served his country’s national interest.” On a slightly less reputable
level, Dinesh D’Souza chimed in that Putin “LOVES his country & FIGHTS for
its interests.”
It’s the well-known “BUT HE FIGHTS” defense of Trump,
transferred to foreign policy.
All of this is troubling because it raises the prospect
that Trump and his supporters will seek to promote American interests in exactly the same way that Putin has
supposedly promoted Russia’s interests—which would, in fact, be a disaster for
our interests.
If our foreign policy is lost in Etchasketchistan, if
everything is shaken up and we have no framework that guides either party
toward a clear foreign policy, then we’re going to have to rebuild our foreign
policy from the foundations. There is no more important foundation than a clear
understanding of what America’s “interests” are, and there is no better
concrete case to start with than by examining what Putin has done to Russian
interests and what his admirers would do to America if they followed his
example.
I have already laid out extensively how Putin has failed
to Make Russia Great Again.
After the Cold War, Russia had the following
opportunities. It had a significant number of educated workers with skills in
science and technology, whose efforts had been stifled under Soviet Communism
but could flourish in a free economy. It had extensive contacts with its former
Eastern European satellites, offset by their resentment and suspicion after
decades under the Soviet boot.
Russia could have pursued a policy intended to reassure
the Poles and Ukrainians and the Baltic states and to secure their lasting
friendship. Russia has a vast and influential cultural legacy—think of all
those great novelists and composers—which had been largely crushed under the
totalitarian thought police. Set free, it could once against reach a global
audience. Finally, Russia is also surrounded by Asian countries that are former
parts of the Soviet Union and have strong Russian connections, whose stability
and economic flourishing would help open up Russian opportunities in Asia.
Instead, Putin systematically subverted all of these
national interests, subordinating them to his quest for state control and
personal power. Instead of trying to establish a truly free economy, he imprisoned
and exiled independent businessmen, whom he regarded as a threat to his power,
and instead established a centralized kleptocracy. He turned Russia into yet
another corrupt petrostate based on the exploitation of state-controlled oil
resources.
In neighboring countries, Putin supported subservient
dictators who would pose no challenge to his corrupt system. Where strong and
free countries threatened to emerge, as in Ukraine, he stoked the embers of
“frozen conflicts” intended to keep Russia surrounded by weak and unstable
neighbors. In the process, he has completely alienated emerging Eastern
European countries like Poland, turning former Warsaw Pact allies into lasting
enemies. He also provoked Western economic sanctions on Russia, which, in combination
with falling oil prices—thanks to good old American free enterprise—has
crumpled the Russian economy.
Against this sorry record, Hewitt was able to name only
one big thing Putin had done to assert Russia’s interests: “projection of
Russian power back into the Middle East,” by way of Putin’s alliance with
Syria’s Bashar Assad.
Take a moment to savor the irony here. Trump and his
supporters—not Hewitt, but guys like
this—generally sneer at U.S. intervention in the Middle East as a foolish
mistake. But what is bad for us is suddenly good for Putin? Also consider that
Putin’s Syrian adventure falls into his wider strategy of building a “zombie
empire,” a global alliance not of the strong and stable, but of the weak and
dependent, a coalition of regimes on their last legs. The Assad regime, a
broken remnant that is unlikely ever to regain full control of its own country,
certainly fits that bill.
But never mind the details. Consider that merely showing
the flag in a military adventure in the Middle East compensates for
comprehensively wrecking Russia’s interests at home and in its immediate
neighborhood. This fits in with a certain conception of a nation’s interests—an
old, monarchical conception, in which the “national interest” is conflated with
the preening, chest-thumping prestige of the head of the state.
In a year of bitter ironies, the closest thing to this
theory in America is a school of thought known as “National Greatness
Conservatism”—developed by those reviled neoconservatives. In a 1997 essay in The Weekly Standard, of all places,
David Brooks announced the theory and summed it up this way.
It almost doesn’t matter what great
task government sets for itself, as long as it does some tangible thing with
energy and effectiveness. The first task of government is to convey a spirit of
confidence and vigor that can then spill across the life of the nation…. But
energetic government is good for its own sake. It raises the sights of the
individual. It strengthens common bonds. It boosts national pride.
In foreign policy, he described this in terms of
“American nationalism.” Does any of that sound familiar? Doesn’t it sound like
Trumpism in a nutshell? It’s a short step from “National Greatness
Conservatism” to “Make America Great Again.”
In practice, this is likely to achieve precisely what
Putin has achieved for Russia: a lot of patriotic slogans and blustering
adventurism meant to “convey a spirit of confidence and vigor”—and to support
the interests of the leader and his cronies—at the expense of the core
interests of the country.
The real legacy of Putin’s leadership can be summed up in
the way the Russian government encouraged athletes to use performance-enhancing
drugs, in a quest for the momentary prestige of winning a lot of Olympic medals
at Sochi at the cost of having most of the Russian Olympic team banned from Rio
this year, an unprecedented national humiliation.
Beyond the posturing and preening, what are America’s
core interests? The core American interests are freedom and prosperity. The
central purpose of government, written right into our founding documents, is
the protection of liberty: “to secure these rights, governments are instituted
among men.” So the first and foremost goal of foreign policy is to protect our
lives and freedom from external threats.
But the larger purpose of liberty is “the pursuit of
happiness,” the achievement of our personal goals and values, which include a
vibrant, creative culture and a vibrant, growing economy. So the “national
interest” also has to include our interest in an economy driven by work,
growth, innovation—and trade. That’s why our foreign policy interests have
historically included things like opening sea lanes used for international
trade and protecting them from pirates and belligerent foreign powers.
More recently, we have pursued a decades-long policy of
negotiating internal free trade agreements—which are calculated to have added
at least a trillion dollars to our annual economic output. America has always
been a trading nation, and international trade has always been part of our
national interest.
Now I think you can see some of the dangers of Trump’s
approach to foreign policy. Based on a false economic mythology, he
specifically targets America’s overseas trade as a problem to be shut down. And
while he’s busy boasting about how he’s going to smack down China and Mexico,
Trump has no specific plan for how to deal with our actual enemies. He has no
strategy for defeating the Islamic State, only a declaration that he will ask
for a strategy once he’s in office. (It is only the astonishingly poor
leadership of the current administration that could make this seem new and
fresh.) When it comes to pushing back against Russia’s attempt to turn Europe
back into a zone of conflict, he seems inclined to give Russia a free hand.
There is a lot that can be debated about exactly what
America’s interests are and what that should mean for our strategy in different
parts of the world. But the concern with Trump is that he seems to value the
symbolic bluster of being a “strong leader”—both overseas and at home—above any
clear definition of American interests. What is alarming is not just the
prospect of having a president who is likely to be friendly to the interests of
a rival like Russia (which is no contrast whatsoever to the current administration).
What is alarming is the prospect of having a president who really believes that
what Putin has been doing for the last 15 years has been promoting Russian
national interests—and that he might want to pursue the same disastrous course
of action for the United States.
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