Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 129

The Precedent-Setting Trial in Paris

Throughout the twentieth century and well into the twenty-first, kleptocrats around the world have managed to successfully plunder their countries’ coffers to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more, hoarding piles of cash for themselves even as their fellow citizens struggled to survive. According to estimates by Transparency International, the most successful among them—people like Indonesia’s Suharto, the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos, the Nigeria’s Sani Abacha—managed to accumulate loot totaling in the billions of dollars.

Until recently, Western response to such brazen theft has left much to be desired. Despite welcome initiatives like the U.S. Department of Justice’s Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative (which launched in 2010), little measurable progress has been made in combating this scourge. One World Bank study found that only $5 billion has been recovered from kleptocrats since the turn of the century, while it estimated that some $40 billion continues to be stolen annually.

Part of the enormity of the task has to do with the difficulties in dismantling a convoluted dual-use infrastructure that has sprung up to service these international thieves, allowing them both to launder and squirrel away their ill-gotten gains abroad. Unscrupulous bankers, real estate agents, and lawyers, all with clients who they at least suspect have blood on their hands, have set up a formidable set of legal roadblocks to anyone pursuing cases of “grand corruption”. For example, the U.S. remains one of the most prominent jurisdictions without any registry identifying the beneficial owners of the shell companies set up in states like Nevada, Wyoming, or Delaware. In the UK, the situation is just as grim.

With this as background, it’s worth keeping an eye on a trial now winding down in a court in Paris. While the confluence of circumstances behind the trial remain unique, a forthcoming ruling has the potential to set a remarkable precedent—both as it pertains to a Western response to kleptocracy, and also as a means for combating the massive looting machines still fully operational in places ranging from Azerbaijan to Astana, and from the Kremlin to Kinshasa.

Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, the Vice President of Equatorial Guinea and the son of the country’s obscenely long-serving President, is alleged to have stolen on a massive scale, with his purportedly pilfered loot running into nine figures, and with Obiang spending the money on an eye-poppingly lavish assortment of assets, listed in painstaking detail in the lawsuits filed against him. Obiang, who once dated rapper Eve, appears to have cultivated the lifestyle of a celebrity high-roller. He owned a Malibu mansion nestled between properties belonging to Mel Gibson and Britney Spears, and cultivated close links to members of Michael Jackson’s family. At one point, he owned half a dozen statues of Michael Jackson himself, and apparently still owns Jackson’s crystal-studded glove. He also adhered to the more traditional trappings of kleptocracy: he owns a private jet, a multi-million dollar wine collection, and, reportedly, a massive yacht featuring a shark tank built in.

The Malibu mansion and the MJ statues were impounded in 2014, when Obiang reached a settlement with the U.S.’s Department of Justice, but the case didn’t go any further. The current French case, brought at the behest of two NGOs (Sherpa and Transparency International) is breaking ground by not only seeking a $34 million fine and the forfeiture of all of Obiang’s assets located in France, but also in seeking a prison sentence—a first for a sitting politician accused of such crimes.

Obiang and his father have overseen the wholesale implosion of Equatorial Guinea’s economy. Obiang’s father has been President since 1979, and meaningful opposition has never existed in the country. The President effectively rules by decree—state radio has already referred to him as a god—and Obiang won the most recent election with 94 percent of the vote. The family’s brazen kleptocracy shines through in basic statistics. The tiny country, one of the larger oil-producers in Africa, maintains the highest GDP per capita in the region. It also has one of the lowest life expectancies globally, with most of its population subsisting on less than a dollar a day.

The verdict is not expected until late October, but the precedent French prosecutors have pursued in this biens mal acquis case has almost certainly rattled kleptocrats elsewhere. The case has already sparked talk of a counter-suit from Obiang’s father, as well as leaders in Gabon and Congo-Brazzaville, against Transparency International, with Obiang’s father claiming that the hundreds of millions of dollars tied to his son were all earned legally. Obiang himself has avoided traveling to Paris during the trial, and there’s little reason to think he’ll ever return to France if found guilty.

Regardless of the trial’s outcome, expect more of these kinds of cases in the future—especially as diaspora communities, like the ones that helped bring the suit against Obiang, realize the type of cudgel Western courts can suddenly wield. The U.S.’s Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative continues expanding the scope of its seizures elsewhere, and anti-corruption coordination between countries is improving by leaps and bounds. While asset recovery is but one tool in combating the types of figures Obiang and his ilk cut, kleptocrats are no longer facing the prospect of simply losing their Maseratis, their mansions, or their Michael Jackson memorabilia. Now, for the first time, the prospect of a prison term awaits.

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How Effective Is China’s Foreign Aid?

China’s growing contributions to foreign development aid in Africa, Asia, and Latin America have been the subject of much consternation in U.S. policy circles. Seen by some as a soft power threat to Western development institutions, by others as a malign effort to exercise political control by ensnaring countries into debt traps, and by others still as a simple economic calculation to chase new markets, Beijing’s overseas spending sprees remain a source of fevered debate, with little consensus on their motivation and actual effect.

A new study from the College of William and Mary’s AidData research lab offers the most comprehensive look at the issue yet. As the Washington Post summarizes, it’s a study that confirms some prevailing narratives and confounds others:

AidData’s research offers a picture of a rising financial giant that is challenging even the biggest donor nations. China provided $354.4 billion in official funding around the world between 2000 and 2014 — not far off the amount spent by the United States in the same period, $394.6 billion. In some counties, the two nations looked like competitors, with China sometimes usurping the United States to become the preeminent donor.

The research also turns some widespread assumptions about Chinese foreign assistance on their heads. In a previously released project, AidData was able to show when you look at Chinese aid that matches the strict, internationally agreed-upon definition — official development assistance, also known as ODA — it does not appear to be motivated by acquiring natural resources or propping up Beijing-friendly authoritarians. […]

AidData’s research also shows the lions share’s of China’s global development spending is not official aid but rather distributed via “other official flows,” or OOF. This bracket of funding includes huge deals, like the enormous loans given to Russian oil companies in 2009, in which the motivation is clearly commercial.

This distinction between official development assistance (ODA) and other official flows (OOF) is a crucial one. Roughly a quarter of China’s aid falls into the former camp: development assistance that is broadly in line with Western financing standards, and which has spurred growth rates that match those of World Bank or OECD-financed projects. According to AidData, the top recipients for that assistance include Cuba, Cote d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, and Zimbabwe. While China may be targeting such countries for political reasons (to curry favor in Africa, for instance), the new study actually shows little evidence that such aid disproportionately creates boondoggles.

But the vast majority of China’s foreign aid falls into the OOF category: Chinese-financed projects that come with lucrative commercial sweeteners for Beijing. As Evan Ellis puts it to the Wall Street Journal, “The Chinese don’t just give loans… They are almost all tied to using Chinese companies as subcontractors.” These sorts of projects are widely seen as external outlets for China’s excess industrial capacity and self-serving business opportunities for Beijing, rather than good-faith efforts to spur development in partner countries. The new research offers no reason to dispute that assessment.

That doesn’t mean that all these projects are wise investments, though. Among the top 10 recipients of Chinese aid here are Pakistan, the troublesome lynchpin of Xi Jingping’s Belt and Road Initiative, and Venezuela, where China has been struggling to collect its debts.

The new study does not directly focus on the political effects of all this aid, whether China’s money can effectively “buy” soft power or political favors within the countries it is targeting. There is certainly some anecdotal evidence to suggest so: Cambodia, for instance, is one of the top recipients of Chinese ODA, and has in recent years become a reliable proxy for Beijing in institutions like ASEAN. And an earlier AidData study showed that African countries who voted in China’s favor at the UN enjoyed a statistically significant bump in financing from Beijing.

It’s not clear, however, whether correlation is causation in this instance. And the broader evidence is mixed when it comes to the effects of Chinese aid on winning foreign hearts and minds. Ghana, for instance, is the 10th largest recipient of Chinese ODA, a country where China enjoyed 80% favorability as recently as 2015. By this year, however, that number had , amid a controversy over China’s illegal gold mining practices. It’s a telling indication of how China’s transactional foreign partnerships can buy temporary goodwill, but go south quickly and attract major local opposition.

Ultimately, there is no single rubric that can neatly explain or predict the effects of China’s money flows. The data here fits several narratives partially but none completely; Chinese development projects are neither invariably white elephants nor strokes of strategic genius that will permanently tie debtors’ fates to Beijing’s.

What is certain is that as Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative ramps up and the United States scales down its foreign aid commitments, much more money will be flowing from China’s coffers in the years to come.

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Where’s the Trust?

The main toxin ruining our politics and coarsening our society is the loss of trust. Not Trump, or evil liberals, or the dishonest media, or right-wing populism, or insufficient fervor for this or that candidate or cause—but rather the widespread and growing belief among Americans that many if not most of their fellow citizens lack basic honesty, integrity, and reliability. Our loss of trust in one another is arguably our biggest social problem, mainly because it helps to drive so many others, from family disintegration to political polarization to post-fact public debate.

It’s also something we rarely discuss. We live in an age that favors almost exclusively the discussion of “them” problems—shortcomings that we can attribute to the bad conduct of a particular group. But mistrusting each other is almost by definition an “us” problem. It implicates all of us. As such, collapsing social trust can’t easily be construed—though how tempting to try!—as simply another thing to blame on Trump, or evil liberals, or the dishonest media, or right-wing populism, or insufficient fervor for this or that candidate or cause.

Evidence of our loss of trust in one another is clear and abundant. For example, a 2013 study reports: “Trust in others and confidence in institutions, two key indicators of social capital, reached historic lows among Americans in 2012 in two nationally representative surveys that have been administered since the 1970s.”1 In Bowling Alone, the great sociologist Robert D. Putnam similarly describes a decades-long U.S. trend of “declining generalized trust and reciprocity.”2

Today, three main types of mistrust course through our society.  One is partisan mistrust: Americans increasingly believe that those with whom they disagree politically are not only misguided but are also bad people, members of an essentially alien out-group.

A second is class mistrust: The approximately 30 percent of Americans with four-year college degrees are mostly thriving; the other 70 percent are falling further and further behind on nearly every measure. Upscale Americans are increasingly isolated from and ignorant about the rest of the country, and large numbers of middle and working class Americans resent and mistrust the nation’s elite class.

And a third is governing mistrust: Huge numbers of Americans no longer believe that their elected leaders, including those from their own party, are honest or can be trusted even to try to do the right thing.

I saw these trends up close this summer with respect to Americans’ political views. With colleagues and a rented bus, and partnering with wonderful local volunteers, I helped to organized 25 workshops involving a total of about 400 voters in communities in Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia, Vermont, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Our purpose was to bring together “red” and “blue” Americans in roughly equal numbers to talk with, rather than simply at or about, each other.

We learned a lot about trust. For example, an extremely common belief today among both liberals and conservatives is that, if I know your position on an issue, I also know why you hold that position. Here’s how it can happen. You say that you want stricter immigration laws. I believe that stricter immigration laws would harm people of color. Therefore I conclude that you favor stricter immigration laws at least partly because you don’t care about people of color.

Or you say that you support Obamacare. But for me, Obamacare means big government stamping out individual choice. Therefore I conclude that you support Obamacare at least partly because you are content to let big government to stamp out individual choice.

See how it works? It’s a three-step mental process in which I glide seamlessly from your policy preference, to my understanding of the bad result of that policy, to my assumption about your bad reason for preferring it.

When you see this phenomenon occur over and over again—particularly when the two sides are in the same room, actually talking to one another, and therefore ultimately holding one another accountable—it becomes crystal clear that this formula for analyzing one’s adversaries generates far more heat than light, far more error than truth.

And why is this flawed formula so popular? One answer is that it encourages demonization, and demonization is all the rage these days. But that only begs the question. The deeper reason, I believe, is that mistrustful Americans find it increasingly hard to assume that their political opponents have decent or even rational motives. After all, it’s not natural or easy to assume that people you don’t trust have basically good intentions; in fact, it may not even make sense to do so.

How deep does today’s political mistrust run? Here’s one clue. We would ask, “Would you be interested in attending a workshop?” They would say, “Maybe, but I’m probably not who you want.” We would ask, “Why do you say that?”  They would answer, “Because I base my views on logic and facts, and therefore don’t know how to talk to people on the other side.”  Both conservatives and liberals earnestly offered us this insight.

Many Americans (and I’m one of them) are distressed by the rise of what appears to be post-fact political rhetoric, made possible by a political culture in which the flagrant distortion of truth is normative and in which determining what is a fact appears to be more a matter of tribal affiliation than objective reality. It’s all terrible.

But what gave birth to this culture? Trump? The dishonest media? The fact that Americans are no longer smart or curious enough to care about facts? I don’t think so. I think this culture emerged mainly because we don’t trust each other.

After all, even the smartest of us don’t determine what is factual mainly by dint of personal investigation.  We accept most facts on the basis of trust, as mediated through what we hope are reputable institutions. I believe that it’s a fact that more Americans in 2016 voted for Hillary Clinton than for Donald Trump. But I didn’t count the ballots. I couldn’t even tell you how they were counted. I believe with certitude that Clinton got more votes than Trump only because people I trust told me she did.

Increasingly, Americans don’t trust anyone outside of their in-group to tell them what the facts are. As a result, what we believe are the facts is increasingly a reflection of the politico-cultural tribe to which we belong.  Our problem is not that Americans have become disdainful of facts. Nor is it that my side respects the facts and your side doesn’t (as tempting as that is to believe). It’s rather that, in a declining-trust society such as ours, both the facts themselves and our ways of thinking about the facts begin to function less as public goods—things that promote shared thriving—and more as private assets which we use to define and defend our group and to attack the group’s enemies.

It’s possible, of course, that declining social trust is less the cause of our problems than the result of them. This argument has a familiar ring. Americans stopped trusting politicians when politicians, particularly in the Vietnam and Watergate era, stopped being trustworthy. Americans lost trust in many key social institutions—from marriage to political parties to organized religion to news organizations—when those institutions stopped meeting people’s needs and expectations. Americans stopped trusting people with whom they disagree politically when those people started embracing crazy, dangerous ideas.

I concede that there is real truth in at least some of these claims. But I’m more supportive of the opposite view. Even if objective social failures or other structural changes in society triggered and therefore help to explain the decline of trust, that decline is now spreading at least partly independently of those failures and changes, feeding on and perpetuating itself. Whatever may have ignited this fire—and that is a complex and necessary discussion for another time—it’s now burning in large measure on its own, wiping out social connections that are both fragile and precious.

What is to be done? Perhaps, in order to regain trust in one another, we need some big, sweeping changes. Reform our election laws. Change how Congress operates. Put an end to gerrymandering. Reduce the influence of money in politics. Reinvent political parties. Make journalism more responsible.  Reduce inequality. Make society more just. I’m convinced that these and similar changes could contribute significantly to renewing social trust, just as I’m convinced that doing any of these things will be difficult because … we don’t trust one another.

So perhaps we also need to think bottom-up, and smaller. Maybe our first and arguably primary task is to do something quite basic: We need to talk to each other. We need Americans who disagree profoundly with one another—Tea Party and Black Lives Matter, Trump supporters and Trump resisters, Southern Baptists and Unitarian Universalists—in the same room, listening to each other with respect and civility, reducing stereotyped thinking about one another by achieving accurate rather than imagined disagreement, and looking when possible for common ground and ways to work together.

Talking to each other. As simplistic and quotidian as that prescription may sound, I’m convinced that, if more trust is the goal, there’s no getting around this requirement and no substitute for it. That’s why my colleagues and I are hitting the road again in a few weeks to participate in more community workshops in Minnesota, Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee—only this time, we’re hoping that the organizers will establish ongoing red-blue “alliances” to continue to build relationships and work together in the community after the workshop is over.

One could think of it as trying to strengthen civil society, community by community. Or as trying to rebuild citizenship from the grassroots up. Or—perhaps this is best—as trying to help us trust one another again.

A guy from one of the workshops in Ohio this summer summed it up about as well as possible. He said, “You don’t hate who you know.”

1Jean M. Twenge, W. Keith Campbell, and Nathan T. Carter, “Declines in Trust in Others and Confidence in Institutions Among American Adults and Late Adolescents,” Psychological Science 25, no. 10 (2014), 1920. Another recent study concludes that, since the mid-1980s, Americans’ trust in each other has “declined dramatically,” in part due to “generational replacement,” as “more trusting generations of Americans have been dying and being replaced by younger, less trusting Americans.”See April K. Clark, Michael Clark, and Daniel Monzin, “Explaining Changing Trust Trends in America,” International Research Journal of Social Sciences 2, no. 1 (January 2013), p. 7. See also Wendy M. Rahn and John E. Trasue, “Social Trust and Value Change: The Decline of Social Capital in American Youth, 1976-1995,” Political Psychology 19, no. 3 (November 3, 1998); and Mark J. Hetherington, Why Trust Matters: Declining Political Trust and the Demise of American Liberalism (Princeton University Press, 2005).

2Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon & Shuster, 2000), p. 142.

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The Shameful State of Debate on the Iran Deal

The Iran nuclear deal and American policy towards Iran are not simple issues. The nuclear deal was negotiated by the Obama Administration over the course of several years. The text of the agreement and its annexes comes in at about 100 pages, much of which is technical detail about mechanisms and measures to ensure that Iran does not, for the duration of the agreement, acquire a nuclear weapon.

The interaction between the deal and American policy options for confronting Iran involves complicated trade offs. As we have argued since the agreement was signed, by focusing solely on the nuclear question the Obama Administration put itself and its successors in the position of having to look the other way for all of Iran’s other bad behavior in exchange for keeping Iran nuke-free for a few more years. The deal’s supporters counter that the alternative would have been the collapse of the sanctions regime, a nuclear-armed Iran, and, almost certainly, war.

The point of this preface is not to rehash the merits or faults of the nuclear deal, but to reiterate the difficulty and seriousness of the issue. It’s unfortunate, then, that the debate over whether or not President Trump ought to decertify the Iran nuclear deal has been so unserious.

The deal’s defenders have by-and-large resorted to the same “echo chamber” approach that helped the Obama Administration get the deal through in the first place. President Obama’s former speechwriter Ben Rhodes tried to defend the deal by ostracizing people who now agree with him:

Interesting to watch Republican hawks who trashed Obama's Iran policy now embrace the deal because they know the consequences of losing it. https://t.co/FYZpg4Qioy

— Ben Rhodes (@brhodes) October 11, 2017

Never mind that that category also includes Democrats like Eliot Engel and apparently most of the Israeli defense establishment. This should go without saying, but the Israelis understand the consequences of a nuclear Iran far better than Ben Rhodes.

Then there’s Samantha Power, President Obama’s UN Ambassador, who approvingly cited the Financial Times arguing that decertifying the deal will strengthen Iran’s “hardliners, grouped around Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader… at the expense of pragmatic conservatives and reformist supporters of President Hassan Rouhani”:

FT’s foreign affairs editor calls Trump’s coming Iran decision “an act of geopolitical arson” that will strengthen Khamenei, the IRGC, and other hardliners https://t.co/tf3jM370Uy

— Samantha Power (@SamanthaJPower) October 10, 2017

This notion that Iran’s hardliners will be “boosted” has been repeated ad nauseum in recent days. It’s entirely possible, even likely, that external pressure from the United States will consolidate the regime’s internal factions. But there’s no evidence that the deal had previously destabilized the regime to such an extent that the President of Iran was somehow in conflict with the armed forces of his own country, or that it had in any way limited the IRGC’s power. On the contrary, the IRGC has never been more powerful either within Iran, where it is newly flush with cash, or across the region.

This supposed threat of regime consolidation is also more than a bit ironic given that defenders of the deal accuse the deal’s critics of seeking regime change. The charge certainly rings true for some. An opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal this week, to give just one example, describes “How to Defeat the Islamic Republic.” But as I’ve written before, the unspoken but no less critical component of the deal is the naive hope of its proponents that it will lead to a fundamental transformation of the Iranian regime by empowering the supposed “moderates.” The sunset provisions, the structure of the economic incentives, John Kerry’s cheerleading for Iranian banks, all of this is part of a perverse system in which the deal will only succeed if 15 years of trade with the West creates a more pro-Western, diplomatically normal Iran. This is regime change by fantasy.

Unfortunately, the case put forward by the the Administration and by the deal’s opponents for decertification has been little better. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Face the Nation last month was asked how the Administration could decertify the agreement if Iran was in compliance with the deal. He replied:

Well, my view on the nuclear deal is they are in technical compliance of the nuclear arrangement. But if you go back and read the preamble to the JCPOA, the nuclear agreement, there clearly was an expectation between the parties, the negotiators from the Western parties as well as Iran, that by dealing with this nuclear threat we would lower the tension between Iran and the rest of the world and we would create conditions for Iran to rejoin the community of nations as a productive country that wants stability, and wants peace, and wants prosperity in the region.

That’s why all these sanctions were lifted. But since the nuclear deal has been concluded what we have witnessed is Iran has stepped up its destabilizing activities in Yemen. It’s stepped up its destabilizing activities in Syria. It exports arms to Hezbollah and other terrorist groups. And it continues to conduct a very active ballistic missile program. None of that, I would believe, is consistent with that preamble commitment that was made by everyone.

To paraphrase Allen Iverson—noted expert in international affairs—”Preamble? We’re talking about the preamble?” Please.

Nor have any other Trump Administration officials made a serious public case for decertifying. Secretary of Defense Mattis last week testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that the deal remained in the national security interests of the United States and that Iran was in technical compliance with its terms. Those are, by law, the two metrics by which the President is required to certify the deal to congress. President Trump is clearly opposed to the deal as it stands and wants to decertify, but his criticisms have never been very specific. Presumably he will elaborate on his case and his strategy during the announcement, but it’s difficult to recall such a major shift in American foreign policy that involved such little outreach to the public, to U.S. allies, or to Congress.

Decertification, after all, will basically punt the issue to Congress. So why pick an unnecessary fight with the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on precisely this issue when you’re about to ask him to fix the deal for you? Maybe Corker is a squish, maybe the Corker-Cardin bill got us into this mess, but antagonizing such a critical voice in the Senate drastically reduces the odds that Congress’ “fix” for the deal will amount to much.

That outcome—a mostly symbolic “fix” of the deal—may be the most likely outcome. But it’s an outcome that neither the nuclear deal’s most vocal defenders nor its opponents want to consider, which perhaps explains why this debate has been so facile. Like President Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, former Obama Administration officials defending the deal cannot be seen to admit that decertification of one of President Obama’s signature foreign policy achievements probably won’t change very much in and of itself. The deal’s opponents, particularly those trying to influence the President, want to offer a path for the President to fulfill his promise to renegotiate the deal. They could never admit that this is an ego stroking exercise; that the same objectives could be accomplished without decertification.

Regardless of the consequences of decertifying the Iran deal, President Trump appears set to present it as a fait accompli by the end of this week. But debate over decertification that pits those carrying water for the Obama Administration against those carrying water for the Trump Administration has failed to produce a serious discussion about what to do after decertification, or how to otherwise confront Iran. For all we can hope that Congress or the President’s national security team can come up with a better plan, this issue deserves a higher standard of public debate.

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Politico: China Abducted American With Impunity

Politico today offers a disturbing peek into Chinese spy games during the Obama Administration, including a previously hushed-up account of the abduction of an American official in Chengdu:

It was January 2016. The U.S. official had been working out of the American consulate in the central Chinese metropolis of more than 10 million. He may not have seen the plainclothes Chinese security services coming before they jumped him. In seconds he was grabbed off the Chengdu street and thrown into a waiting van.

The Chinese officials drove their captive — whom they believed to be a CIA officer — to a security facility where he was interrogated for hours, and, according to one U.S. official, filmed confessing to unspecified acts of treachery on behalf of the U.S. government.

It wasn’t until the early morning hours of the following day that other U.S. officials — who were not immediately informed by their Chinese counterparts of the consular official’s capture — arrived to rescue him. He was eventually released back to their custody and soon evacuated from the country.

The circumstances surrounding this incident eerily parallel a similar one in Moscow that also occurred on President Obama’s watch. In that case, it was Russia’s FSB that roughed up an American official suspected of espionage on U.S. diplomatic grounds. In both cases, Obama officials took pains to hide the incident from public view while protesting through official channels—though that didn’t stop Moscow from publicly releasing footage of the brawl to humiliate Washington and score propaganda points at home.

Indeed, the Politico story fits into a disturbing pattern of brazen provocations by rival spy services during the Obama years—provocations that were protested in private but never publicly exposed or avenged. As Damir Marusic wrote about the Russian incident at the time, President Obama preferred to compartmentalize such events so as not to endanger cooperation elsewhere:

President Obama seems determined to not be baited by this kind of stuff, even if it is causing lasting frustration and outrage among the men and women serving in the diplomatic and intelligence corps. Indeed, one could easily imagine the President making the case that there is little to be gained from descending to the Russians’ level in such matters.

That thinking seems to have prevailed in the Chinese case as well. And keep in mind that previous to this incident, China had already hacked the Office of Personnel Management and systematically dismantled the CIA’s spy network beginning in 2010.

One can interpret that decision charitably (as a calculation that such things are best resolved through quiet diplomacy) or cynically (as a political decision to avoid a potential scandal during an election year). Regardless, the effect was the same: Obama’s timidity became its own form of recklessness, emboldening rivals who calculated that they could act against Americans with impunity.

And indeed, Beijing’s spooks got the message, and appear to have upped their game. Politico cites several examples: a broadening of recruitment efforts beyond the usual Chinese-American targets, sophisticated cyber attacks that led to “staggering” breaches, omnipresent surveillance of American officials, and frequent searches of their rooms and belongings. Some of these tactics mirror the heavy-handed harassment of American officials that has long been standard practice in Moscow.

And China’s espionage efforts are arguably more sophisticated than Russia’s, and its efforts are expanding. This year alone, two federal government employees have been charged with passing state secrets to Beijing, and allies like Australia and New Zealand are currently mired in domestic dramas about Chinese influence in their university system and Parliament, respectively. The need for vigilance about Chinese espionage has never been greater.

This is a case where President Trump’s Jacksonian instincts and penchant for showmanship may actually serve him well. Rather than burying the danger of Chinese spy games, the Trump Administration should respond publicly to any such provocations, making it abundantly clear that any such behavior will not go unanswered. One of the more interesting details in the Politico story is that the Obama Administration “issued a veiled threat to kick out suspected Chinese agents within the U.S.” during the diplomatic talks around the Chengdu incident. It’s not clear that that threat was ever carried out—but if the FBI is sitting on a Chinese spy ring, now might be a good time to publicly break it up as loudly as possible, and send a message to Beijing.

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Burying Carbon in Iceland

Tomorrow, a Zurich-based company will attempt to pull off a feat that sounds more like alchemy than engineering: extracting CO2 from Icelandic air, mixing it with water, and burying it underground, where they say it will interact with basaltic rock to turn to stone.

Carbon capture and technology is something of a silver bullet when it comes to mitigating climate change. If it were able to be scaled to commercial levels at relatively cheap costs, it could nullify concerns over humanity’s impact on global climate via carbon dioxide emissions in one fell swoop.

But if it sounds too good to be true, that’s because—at this point—it is. It’s dreadfully expensive, and attempts to scale it up have been met with large cost overruns. This latest experiment in Iceland is no different, but Climeworks, the Swiss company behind it, is hoping to use this as a proof of concept.

Barring some technological breakthrough, this won’t be a cost effective option anytime soon, but its potential to one day fundamentally remake the calculus underpinning climate change makes it worth pursuing. Of course, it’s still prudent to pursue policies (sane ones) that seek to minimize emissions in the meantime, but governments should be doing everything they can to support projects like this one.

Research and development spending often gets short shrift by climate advocates in favor of subsidies for current-gen products like solar panels or wind turbines, both of which often require financial support in order to compete with fossil fuels. However, given the magnitude of the climate problem, we ought to be doing everything we can to develop new technologies—like the one being tested this week in Iceland—that have the potential to change the game.

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Erdogan’s High-Stakes Game

This Sunday brought a set of dramatic diplomatic tit-for-tat gestures between the United States and Turkey, two NATO allies. Citing the imprisonment of a second Turkish employee at one of its consulates, the U.S. Mission in Turkey declared that it would stop processing non-immigrant visa requests. Within a few hours, the Turkish Embassy in Washington announced similarly that it too would stop processing visa requests.

The moves amount to an escalation of what until now had been a one-sided set of attacks by Turkey against the United States, whom it blames for everything from the attempted overthrow of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to supporting terrorists and even, according to the Mayor of Ankara, causing earthquakes. The U.S. approach has been to ignore the daily invectives, which regularly make the front page of virtually every major newspaper in Turkey.

Relations between the two allies have been on a downward slide for some time. Turks have been upset at the fact that the United States has allied itself with Syrian Kurds against the Islamic State (IS) in Syria; the most effective fighters among the Syrian Kurds have been those affiliated with the Kurdish insurgency in Turkey. Moreover, Ankara has been at odds with the United States over the detention of a Turkish-Iranian businessman and a deputy president of a Turkish bank, accused, along with others, of using the American banking system in a scheme to skirt international sanctions against Iran. Erdoğan wants them returned, fearing that, if they were to spill the beans, he or his government could be implicated in a racket worth billions of dollars. There is also the case of the exiled Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen, whom Erdoğan accused of masterminding the failed July 2016 coup attempt. Erdoğan has purged more than 150,000 from government rolls, imprisoned 50,000, including 170 journalists, and eliminated half of the military’s senior officer corps in an effort consolidate power once and for all.

Erdoğan raised the stakes when he made it clear that imprisoned Americans and dual citizens, mostly held based on false charges, would only be released when the United States released or extradited the folks he wanted. He first had a Turkish employee of the U.S. consulate in Adana, Hamza Uluçay, arrested back in February on “terrorism” charges. This past week, another Turkish employee, Metin Topuz, was arrested on terrorism charges in Istanbul, after a campaign the government mounted by means of its proxies in the press (that is, most dailies). To arrest two U.S. employees in an overt attempt to influence Washington to do a “hostage” exchange put American officials in a difficult position; hundreds of Turkish nationals working for the United States are now at risk of being arrested on frivolous charges. One can only imagine the fear that these employees must now live with.

Why is Erdoğan taking such risks in alienating what had heretofore been Turkey’s most reliable ally (notwithstanding occasional differences over the years)? One explanation is that the confrontation with the United States has more to do with his own domestic political calculations, and that foreign policy is just a convenient tool. He may also be taking such risks because successive U.S. administrations have indulged him, deeming Turkey too important to U.S. interests. After all, the mammoth İncirlik Air Base in southern Turkey is the most active location in the fight against the Islamic State. Moreover, it was less than two weeks ago that President Trump in a meeting in New York with Erdoğan loudly boasted that Turkish-American relations had never been better.

Trump’s comments were detached from reality, and so Erdoğan may have been misled by them. Then again, the Obama Administration also never criticized Erdoğan for engineering Turkey’s rapid descent into authoritarianism. Surrounded by yes men, the Turkish leader has no one against whom to check his policy choices.

The U.S. visa announcement provided an off-ramp for the crisis; the United States clearly wants its employees and citizens released. Erdoğan’s love of brinksmanship has limits, too. When he tried it with Putin, the Russian leader immediately slapped sanctions severe enough on Turkey to force him to unceremoniously backpedal. In the present case, he is likely to escalate further before backing down, but in the process he is putting the American-Turkish relation at serious risk of irreparable damage. After the detentions and earlier incidents involving Erdoğan’s security guards assaulting peaceful protestors on U.S. soil, anger in Washington is boiling over. Even the most pro-Turkish American diplomats are seething with rage.

What will the next steps be? The U.S. visa announcement was a blunt instrument that is likely to hurt students and businesspeople, among others, whose needs for travel between Turkey and the United States are great; the United States should more carefully target the visa ban. Turkey may make life difficult for Americans fighting in Syria; it can interfere with operations conducted from İncirlik and harass other diplomats. Tourism in Turkey, already in the doldrums, is sure to be a casualty of the dispute, and the Turkish economy as a whole will also suffer (at the time of writing, the lira had already lost more than 3 percent of its value, as had the Istanbul stock market).

Down the road, one can imagine that, once the main operations against the Islamic State in Syria are completed, Washington will tell Ankara that it no longer needs and will vacate İncirlik Air Base. That’s when the real calamity for U.S.-Turkish relations will set in.

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The Bittersweet Fruits of Trump’s North Korea Policy

Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal published a story under the celebratory headline “U.S. Pressure on North Korea’s Global Ties Bears Fruit.” It offers a revealing look at the State Department’s efforts to pressure Pyongyang by coercing third parties to downgrade ties with the regime:

U.S. officials have asked countries to shut down businesses owned by the North Korean government, remove North Korean vessels from ship registries, end flights by the country’s national air carrier and expel its ambassadors. At the Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit earlier this year, U.S. diplomats made sure North Korea couldn’t secure any bilateral meetings.

Mexico, Peru, Spain and Kuwait all expelled their North Korean ambassadors after the U.S. warned that Pyongyang was using its embassies to ship contraband and possibly weapons components in diplomatic pouches and earn currency for the regime. Italy became the latest country to do so on Oct. 1.

Kuwait and Qatar, among other countries, have agreed to reduce the presence of North Korean guest workers, according to U.S. officials and people familiar with the matter.

The story goes on to explain how the State Department has assembled a “to-do list” that outlines all of North Korea’s known economic interests and relationships around the world. American diplomats have then been approaching their counterparts with specifically tailored requests to sever those links, no matter how small: for example, the U.S. convinced Germany earlier this year to shutter a hostel in Berlin accused of laundering money for Pyongyang.

This is a trend that we at TAI have noticed ourselves: in May, for instance, the State Department publicly pressured ASEAN countries to cut off funding streams to North Korea, and it recently denied economic aid to Egypt for failing to suspend such illicit ties. Combined with the escalating sanctions from both the UN Security Council and the Treasury Department, it all adds up to a picture of Trump putting a serious squeeze on North Korea.

But here’s the rub: for all its tactical successes, the Trump administration is pursuing a strategic aim that the intelligence community overwhelmingly believes to be unachievable. The WSJ again:

U.S. policy makers, led by Mr. Tillerson, have said they hope that Mr. Kim eventually will conclude his program comes at too high a cost to his regime and his nation and enter disarmament talks.

The likelihood of success has become a matter of debate. The U.S. intelligence community has concluded that no amount of pressure would convince Mr. Kim to disarm because the North Korean leader sees the nuclear and missile program as his regime’s ticket to survival, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican, said at a recent hearing.

“Tillerson’s working against—I applaud what he’s done, but he’s working against the unified view of our intelligence agencies, which say there’s no amount of pressure that can be put on them to stop,” Mr. Corker said.

The fact that Pyongyang will not disarm unilaterally should not come as a revelation; both common sense and carefully considered intelligence have long suggested that to be the case. But that assessment, which is increasingly being voiced aloud, speaks to a fundamental disconnect between means and ends on our North Korean policy. This is a longstanding tension that has yet to be resolved by the Trump Administration.

Ironically (and despite dramatic pronouncements to the contrary), Trump’s policy is in many ways an extension of Obama’s. According to the WSJ, State’s campaign to tighten the screws on Pyongyang’s enablers began in early 2016, when the intelligence community saw the regime making nuclear advances much more rapidly than previously foreseen. Tillerson embraced and intensified the campaign to isolate Pyongyang, but the tactics he is using are not fundamentally new.

What is new, of course, is the President’s singular rhetorical approach: his blustery talk of “fire and fury,” derogatory nicknames (“Little Rocket Man”), and threats to “totally destroy” North Korea. But as the WSJ story hints, those rhetorical thunderbolts are at best irrelevant and at worst counterproductive to the real work at hand. Effective pressure on Pyongyang’s enablers is not coming from the President’s Twitter feed but from the State Department and Treasury—the same “deep state” bureaucracies that Trump so reviles. In short, the Administration’s success stories have happened in spite of Trump, not because of him. This only makes the President’s recent rift with Tillerson more regrettable, since it undercuts Tillerson’s standing as a credible interlocutor and could cut off promising diplomatic avenues.

State and Treasury will likely keep doing their work in severing Pyongyang’s funding sources, despite and through the President’s outbursts. But ultimately, Trump will need to wed those tactics to an achievable end goal. A policy based on economic pressure and angry Tweets, with Pyongyang’s willing disarmament the desired result, may well be doomed.

President Trump ominously tweeted this week that there is “only one option” left, and Secretary of Defense Mattis is publicly urging military leaders to prepare for possible conflict. Another bluff? Only time will tell. But ultimately, the “only one option” left to President Trump might be an old-fashioned one: deterrence and containment. That is a policy that may well require the marshaling of substantial military resources, along with an intensified version of the economic pressure that State and Treasury are already applying with some success. But it will also require the sort of painstaking diplomatic engagement that the President has been quick to denigrate—and a coherent strategic vision that he has yet to articulate.

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The Downfall of the American-Turkish Alliance

Americans generally take it for granted that they can travel where they want, when they want. In the “Global Passport Power Rank,” U.S. passports are usually near the top, with visa-free or visa-on-arrival travel for virtually every country in the world. Only rogue states and American adversaries like Iran, Cuba, North Korea, and Syria pose much of a challenge for Americans looking to go abroad. But today, America’s NATO ally Turkey joins that list. As the BBC reports:

Turkey and the US have become embroiled in a consular row, mutually scaling back visa services.

The American mission in Ankara said it had suspended all non-immigrant visa services in order to “reassess” Turkey’s commitment to staff security.

Turkey’s embassy in Washington replied by suspending “all visa services”.

The latest spat began when a US consulate worker in Istanbul was held over suspected links to a cleric blamed for last year’s failed coup in Turkey.

Washington condemned the move as baseless and damaging to bilateral relations.

In case the childishly tit-for-tat nature of the suspension wasn’t immediately obvious, the statement issued by the Turkish embassy was a word-for-word copy of the original statement issued by the American embassy.

Suffice it to say, none of this is normal. The markets apparently agree. The Turkish Lira plunged 3.1 percent overnight, and Turkey’s Borsa Istanbul 100 fell 2.7 percent.

We’ve written extensively in the past about how Turkey is drifting apart from the West. For Europe, the divide focuses on human rights concerns and the sharp differences in values espoused by liberal Europe on the one hand and an increasingly Islamist Turkey on the other. And while President Trump has made it clear that he doesn’t intend to let human rights concerns get in the way of U.S. relations with strongman-led governments, more concrete questions of national interest, like U.S. backing for Syrian Kurdish groups and Turkey’s support for Qatar in the Gulf crisis, remain points of diplomatic friction.

But merely looking at the differences between U.S. and Turkish interests doesn’t get to the heart of what’s going on here. Turkey has also been suffering from a kind of national nervous breakdown since the failed coup attempt of July 2016. Paranoid conspiracy theorizing, a traditional feature of Turkish discourse, was supercharged when the coup revealed that some of the conspiracies were actually true. Erdogan himself narrowly missed death at the hands of a hit squad sent to his hotel on the night of the coup.

As if this weren’t enough, Erdogan’s constitutional project aims at a fundamental reinvention of the Turkish nation comparable only to Atatürk’s forging of modern Turkey itself. Turks of all political stripes see themselves as under siege by conspiracies from within and without, whether by foreign governments, dissident coup plotters, Islamists, secularists, Kurds, the West, and, yes, the United States.

This conspiratorial logic helps explain why Erdogan views American prisoners as potential hostages with which to bargain for Fethullah Gulen, the alleged architect of the coup attempt. Last week, Erdogan made that view explicit in reference to a detained American pastor, Andrew Brunson: “We have given you all the documents necessary [for the extradition of Gülen]. But they say, ‘give us the pastor.’ You have another pastor in your hands. Give us that pastor and we will do what we can in the judiciary to give you this one.” Such is the logic of the post-coup purge, which, among thousands of other targets, now includes anyone caught wearing a T-shirt with the word “Hero” on it. It’s the logic of a man who, when confronted with dissent of any kind, even in a foreign country, resorts to violent thuggery against protesters, no matter what the cost to his country’s reputation.

It’s entirely possible that the visa spat will be resolved quickly. Turkey could decide to back down and release either the U.S. consulate worker (whom, it should be noted, is a Turkish national) or Pastor Brunson as a show of good faith. But even if these specific situations are resolved, Turkey’s highly volatile foreign policy, especially toward the United States and Europe, will remain. Turkey, planning yet another incursion into Syria in cooperation with Russia and threatening joint action with Iran against Iraqi Kurdistan, risks a much deeper split with the United States. The possibility of a total collapse in U.S.-Turkish relations cannot be ruled out.

Erdogan, displaying an unusual degree of restraint, described the recent U.S. visa decision as “saddening.” He’s right, but what’s sad is less the visa situation itself and more the downfall of a once-thriving democracy, along with the decline of a once-close alliance.

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Yes, Mr. President—Sovereignty!

The last time I heard a President utter anything I wrote was in 1980. The President was Jimmy Carter, and he used my words because, whether he realized it or not, I wrote them for him. I was all of 21 when I worked in President Carter’s speechwriting office thanks to a great boss, Hendrik Hertzberg. Chris Matthews, not yet of Hardball fame, was also there; Chris got to meet with President Carter, but I never did. No matter: There President Carter would stand anyway, in the East Room or the Yellow Room, reading my words as if they were his.

If only I could get President Trump to do the same.

According to numerous pundits, columnists, and others, the President mentioned the word “sovereignty” 21 times in his September 19 UN General Assembly speech. In The Sovereignty Solution: A Commonsense Approach to Global Security (2011), I and my co-authors used the word “sovereignty” hundreds of times.1

I was abroad when the President delivered his speech, but distance hardly dampened the surprise. No, I’m not claiming that White House speechwriters borrowed anything from our book. But I do feel somewhat proprietary about both the word and certain concepts associated with it. Granted, not all of the themes sounded in The Sovereignty Solution were unique to us, and not all of our themes were represented in the President’s speech. But a number of them were. If he only were to consistently put them into practice it would be a good thing for all of us.

Any policy bent on reinvigorating sovereignty should marry together two principles: “to each his own” with “don’t tread on me.” Both should be familiar to Americans. John Wayne’s character in The Shootist perhaps sums them up best: “I won’t be wronged. I won’t be insulted. I won’t be laid a-hand on. I don’t do these things to other people, and I require the same from them.”

President Trump has been heading in this “don’t, or else” direction ever since he announced his candidacy, while one thing his victory and that of other populists should make clear is that 21st-century fears have totally outstripped Washington’s ability to make the world feel sufficiently safe to hundreds of millions of Americans.

Consider the fact that 16 years of Sisyphean activity in Afghanistan and Iraq (not to mention Somalia, Yemen, Libya, and against al-Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, and AQIM, to name just a few scourges) have not brought anything remotely like victory. Consider that even with the all of the crocodile tears shed over corruption, foreign leaders who receive U.S. taxpayer-funded assistance continue to fail at delivering essential services. Consider, too, the secrets spilled by what has become a succession of treason-minded government employees posing as transparency saints. Why shouldn’t Americans (and others) be worried?

All of which should lead to an obvious conclusion: In an era of non-stop spin, counter-spin, misinformation, disinformation, and “fake news,” we would be far better off if we had a national security strategy that placed a premium on strategic clarity, so that all audiences—foreign and domestic—knew where we stand, and what we would not countenance.

As President Trump already seems to intuit, we also need a military that can be operationally ambiguous. Telegraphing military deadlines or other details seldom makes sense. Yet without strategic clarity, operational ambiguity is fraught with danger. When the public can’t know what to expect if certain events occur, conspiracy theorists and political opportunists will fill the vacuum.

As it is, we are living with rampant fear-mongering, and are also showing ourselves to be increasingly divisible. That makes us vulnerable to manipulation, and worse. Consequently, we need something we Americans can collectively agree to stand for—something that binds us together and distinguishes us from others, but not in such a way as to rub our sense of exceptionalism in other peoples’ faces.

Here is where the President is on to something with his stress on sovereignty. But he needs to make the full case without contradiction and in measured tones.

I can’t reprise here all of the arguments we make in our book—which is why we wrote a book. But I can note a few of the ways in which the President’s remarks could portend greater global sanity if he can now transpose them from an initial speech to policy reality.

Again, the two predicates to bear in mind are “to each his own” and “don’t tread on me”—or, if I were to offer the President a summary tweet: “We’ll be us, you be you.” We Americans can’t be all things to all people. The more we try to be principled but non-judgmental, the more morally self-righteous but unprincipled we seem. We confuse and frustrate others, not to mention ourselves. Far better to concentrate instead on what does (or should) make America great again—for us, which is what “we’ll be us, you be you” would deliver.

But back to President Trump and his speech. There are several significant overlaps between what he said and what we said. Consider a few.

The President said: “We do not expect diverse countries to share the same cultures, traditions, or even systems of government. But we do expect all nations to uphold these two core sovereign duties: to respect the interests of their own people and the rights of every other sovereign nation.”

In The Sovereignty Solution we wrote: “In the end, we don’t have to be the same, think the same, or practice the same the world over. States just have to accede to the same set of rules for occupying the planet together.” Indeed, every country should be “just as free as we are to set its own course without worrying about outside interference … so long as nothing they do violates others’ sovereignty in terms of pollution, refugee flows, or inability to police their own borders.”

Trump: “All responsible leaders have an obligation to serve their own citizens, and the nation-state remains the best vehicle for elevating the human condition.”

The Sovereignty Solution: “Until humans stumble or agree on a new way to arrange political space around the globe, states are the sociogeographic containers we have. Nothing else at the moment has states’ potential to box in ‘bad guys.’ Nothing else grants diverse peoples a freer rein to govern themselves as they see fit.”

Trump: “We must deny the terrorists safe haven, transit, funding, and any form of support for their vile and sinister ideology. We must drive them out of our nations. It is time to expose and hold responsible those countries who support and finance terror groups like al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, the Taliban, and others that slaughter innocent people.”

The Sovereignty Solution: “By rights, Washington should not even have to remind foreign leaders that they are responsible for anything that violates our sovereignty (including anyone who bears their country’s passport) … in a world in which sovereignty demands the fulfillment of certain duties and doesn’t just promise [heads of state] deference—non-state actors, literally, would not exist.”

Trump: “All people deserve a government that cares for their safety, their interests, and their wellbeing, including their prosperity.”

The Sovereignty Solution: “The domestic bargain that lies at the heart of sovereignty for any people is that a government meet its citizens’ demands. How it accomplishes this is up to it to work out with them. That a government does so, though, is the only guarantee that none of its citizens will want to drag it into dangerous predicaments by rebelling, thereby purposely or inadvertently attracting others’ interest and support.”

Trump: “Today, if we do not invest ourselves, our hearts, and our minds in our nations, if we will not build strong families, safe communities, and healthy societies for ourselves, no one can do it for us.”

The Sovereignty Solution: “When countries have viable social contracts designed by and for them, indivisibility results. Ultimately, we should want all other countries to achieve this for at least two reasons: first, the world is too diverse for anything less. But second, the world needs to stay diverse. Without diversity there is no distinctiveness. Should the United States lose its distinctiveness not only would that be bad for us, but, in any kind of world, our loss would not be good for anyone else either.”

As discerning readers will note, I have cherry-picked my way through the President’s speech. I have also purposely avoided calling attention to any of its inconsistencies because I see no value just now in sharpshooting. I want the President to reinvigorate sovereignty, carefully, thoroughly, and so that it works.

For instance, take our escalating feud with North Korea. Ten years ago, when first making our sovereignty arguments, my co-authors and I proposed a “Standing Declaration of Preemption” for situations too time-constrained for formal declarations of war. The premise was that the President might need to move more swiftly than congressional debate over a declaration of war would allow (a return to which we also advocated). Just as with a declaration of war, a Standing Declaration of Preemption would require congressional debate to pre-approve the time-sensitive use of military force. To receive such pre-approval, the Administration would have to identify who exactly poses a threat, the specific nature of the threat, what would be required to neutralize it, and what the triggers for acting would be.

Here is what we wrote in late 2010 about Korea:

One example of the need for a standing declaration would likely be North Korea today. Given North Korea’s demonstrated nuclear and ballistic missile capability, the President could ask Congress for a standing declaration whose trigger would be North Korea readying its long-range ICBMs for launch without being willing to verifiably divulge their payloads. In such a case, with a Standing Declaration of Preemption, Congress would pre-authorize the President to use sufficient force to destroy the missiles prior to launch, while any further action against North Korea would require a formal Declaration of War.

Imagine how useful such a declaration would be today, not just for reassuring countries in Pyongyang’s blast range, but to send Kim Jong-un an unequivocal message: Stop playing “chicken” with us. Cross our red lines and the whole world will know what to expect: the elimination of your launch capabilities and your regime. Unfortunately, there is no such declaration in place and nothing like it on the horizon.

Another aspect of our “sovereignty rules” that should particularly appeal to President Trump is that all transgressions of U.S. sovereignty require a response since counterpunching is the only principled way to deter violators, no matter the scale of the violation. What those responses consist of would remain a closely held secret, in keeping with the “strategic clarity/operational ambiguity” approach we believe best protects our national security. Worth noting, too, is that applying the “or else” rule doesn’t require us to invade or to go nuclear, which is how some people misread any mention of decisive force. With its current arsenal, the U.S. military has numerous ways to eliminate violators without needing to turn their surroundings into glass.

Of course, what makes the case of North Korea especially tragic is that had we begun living in a “sovereignty rules” world decades ago, North Korea’s neighbors—not us—would have borne the responsibility of holding it to account. For example, no country should ever have allowed itself to be blackmailed into feeding its neighbor’s citizens. Nor should any country have put up with the abduction of its own people. Pick your metaphor: When countries bury their heads in the sand or kick the can down the road so as to not have to confront predatory or sociopathic neighbors, relations rarely improve. Indeed, diplomatic indecisiveness generally only ensures that unresolved situations worsen. Or as Lord Vansittart, staunch opponent of appeasement, said: “It is usually sound to do at once what you have to do ultimately.”

Meanwhile, if we take sovereignty seriously, we must acknowledge that other countries do have the right to develop whatever arsenals they choose. Just because a country seeks nuclear weapons and engages in vile rhetoric does not grant us the right to attack it. The sovereignty quid pro quo of “don’t tread on me” and “to each his own” provides other options. For instance, a country like North Korea that refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty belongs on a nuclear watch list. Should an unattributable nuclear device be set off anywhere, it and all other countries on the list would then have to open themselves up to full inspection—or else. They would either have to be able to prove they had nothing to do with the attack, or they would place themselves in the category of being accomplices.

Sovereignty needs teeth. Otherwise, we will be stuck in the same no-win situations we find ourselves in right now. Consider that for the past several decades we’ve launched missile strike after missile strike in one country after another—and with what results? The litany of places whose china we keep having to break has only grown longer. President Trump is right about at least one thing: We don’t win any more. In part, this is because waging long, fitful wars from the shadows doesn’t fit our culture; it is certainly not our military’s forte. But winning also requires a decisive, not equivocating, application of force, and a decisive finish, which means that we dictate terms—terms that will render an adversary incapable of taking up arms against us (or our allies) again.

Common sense suggests that if we are not willing to be decisive, then military force must be the wrong foreign policy tool to use. Tellingly, a sovereignty-based approach to global security suggests exactly the same thing, especially since “don’t tread on me” represents just one half of the sovereignty equation. Remember, the other half is “to each his own.”

Nothing holds more promise for helping us inhabit the earth together with all of our clashing cultural, religious, and ideological differences than adoption of “we’ll be us, you be you” as a tenet of U.S. foreign policy. By the same token, nothing will more effectively impel foreign heads of state to have to live up to their sovereign obligations to their own citizens than reminding them what will happen should they not, especially when their dereliction causes American casualties.

No one is better positioned than President Trump to spell this out: “Be more responsible for and responsive to your own people, or else. Address their concerns. If you don’t, let just one of them target us out of a sense of justifiable frustration or anger with you. If you don’t then rectify the situation, you and your regime are finished.”

A decade ago, I thought the chances were good that, if the U.S. government began to operate according to the principles described above, other countries would see the value in following suit. I would now modify that assessment. I think the chances are better than good that, if President Trump adopted these principles and applied them consistently and wisely, numerous leaders (and aspiring leaders) would find themselves either wanting or having to follow suit.

Certainly, the President’s UN speech was not the usual presidential address. As a speech, it contained little in the way of soaring rhetoric. But, like much that President Trump does, it did defy norms, and it did lay down a marker. We will soon be able to see how serious the President is—if he makes more of sovereignty. We should all hope so, no matter what we think of the messenger. The global stakes are too high for anything less, just as they are too high for more of the same.

1A significantly more nuanced version of an argument first published in these pages in 2007.

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