Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 2

Intelligence Failure

In the pre-coronavirus era, President Trump’s attacks on the so-called Deep State seemed focused on one thing: undermining the Intelligence Community’s assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 campaign to help get him elected, and more recently, stopping the IC from raising similar alarms about the 2020 campaign. Trump’s egregious mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic–including playing down a series of early warnings from U.S. intelligence agencies when there was still time to slow the spread of the virus and prepare the health care system–makes clear that the problem is deeper and wider than Russia and election meddling. Even when the stakes are life and death, the President does not want to hear intelligence or expert analysis that contradict his ill-informed opinions or threaten his personal interests or ego.

Instead of learning the lesson of what happens when he ignores, bullies, ridicules, and fires truth-telling experts, Trump and his team are moving ahead with their plan to subvert the Intelligence Community’s most senior position­, the Director of National Intelligence. The DNI was created at the urging of the 9/11 Commission to bring some order to the fractious IC and break down the structural barriers and rivalries that led to the failure to share critical intelligence. It has never lived up to expectations for a host of political and bureaucratic reasons, but the DNI still has considerable influence over budgets and analytical priorities for the 17 intelligence agencies and shaping community-wide analyses. The DNI is also the President’s principal intelligence advisor, charged with telling uncomfortable truths. Even with varying levels of influence and access, it is a responsibility that past DNIs—a senior diplomat, two retired admirals, a retired general, and most recently a former U.S. Senator-turned-Ambassador—appear to have taken very seriously.

Truth-telling is not what this President is looking for—or how he sees the DNI’s job. After Trump ousted (officially he stepped down) his first DNI Dan Coats—the least showboating of Washington officials, he dared to veer, politely, from the Trump line on Russia, Iran, and North Korea—Trump declared that he wanted someone who can really “rein” in “intelligence agencies [that] have run amok.”  His current acting DNI, U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, best known for his Twitter trolling and his impolitic enthusiasm for Austria’s anti-immigrant Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, whom he deemed  “a rockstar,” is enthusiastically following orders.  (Grenell, a former press spokesman, is also known for his caustic dealings with reporters, but I had a good relationship with him during the Bush 43 years.)

Grenell immediately forced out the Deputy DNI Andrew Hallman, an intelligence professional with 30 years of experience, and brought in as his top adviser Kashyap Patel, a champion of deep state/anti-Trump conspiracies. Patel, who made his name trying to derail the House Russia probe as an investigator for then-House Intelligence chairman Rep. Devin Nunes, also had a brief star turn in the House impeachment investigation, when Fiona Hill, Trump’s former top adviser on Russia and Europe, described her surprise when she discovered that “apparently, the President may think that Kash Patel is our Ukraine Director.” (Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who held the job until Trump fired him, had the job and was the real Ukraine expert.)

Grenell also quickly ousted the top two officials—both professionals with decades of experience—at the National Counterterrorism Center, created after 9/11 to integrate information from across the IC. There are now no Senate-confirmed officials left at the Office of the DNI. Grenell has also imposed a hiring freeze, raising questions about the Administration’s longer-term plans, especially for the already under-staffed Counterterrorism Center. Fear and loathing is running so high at the normally staid ODNI that Hill staffers say they are hearing reports of political loyalty tests and orders that TVs be turned to Fox News—a particular insult, if true, for professionals who pride themselves on their balanced analysis.

For the permanent job of DNI, Trump has again chosen Rep. John Ratcliffe, who made his bones with the White House by insulting former Special Counsel Robert Mueller on camera. Ratcliffe is also a champion of the White House/Fox News “Spygate” theory—that the Russia investigation was engineered by the FBI/CIA/Clinton campaign to entrap and then derail Trump’s presidential bid.

The President tried to put Ratcliffe in the job last summer, but even some Republicans, most notably Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr, objected to the Texas congressman’s lack of experience and reports that he had hyped his credentials. This time around, Burr is working to speed Ratcliffe’s nomination through once the Senate returns to DC. (Ratcliffe is already making the rounds of committee members by telephone.) Some reports have suggested that Burr is trying to make nice with the White House, or at least avoid Trump’s Twitter trolling, now that he is being criticized for dumping hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of stock after receiving classified intelligence briefings on the coming pandemic. Burr denies he acted on insider information. Burr’s personal antipathy toward Grenell may well be the overriding factor.

Getting through to Trump is never easy. He refuses to read briefing books and is impatient with oral and visual presentations that have too much data or challenge his worldview. One of his main complaints about his second National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, a three-star with a PhD and Silver Star, was that he “lectured.” If McMaster or Coats (or former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, former chief of staff John Kelly, or his current trade adviser Peter Navarro, who warned in a January 29 memo of potentially catastrophic economic and human costs from a pandemic) could not cut through the Trump miasma, would it be any better with another, independent-minded DNI? Probably not. But with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence managed by Trump-captives and conspiracy-spinners, there will be no chance of cutting through no matter how clear and present the danger.

Philip Zelikow, who directed the 9/11 Commission and is now the White Burkett Miller Professor of History at the University of Virginia, warns that the problem of a politicized DNI goes far beyond the White House. “It doesn’t just corrupt the information that goes to the president, who may not care.” The intelligence enterprise “spends somewhere north of $60-$70 billion a year. That’s not just all for one man. It’s creating institutional products meant to serve the entire upper echelon of the U.S. government, help inform our allies, and even sometimes state and local officials.”

If a DNI is so inclined, there are opportunities to deflect, divert and suppress information gathering and analysis. Consider the issue of Russian interference in the 2020 elections. When Kirstjen Nielsen was Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, she couldn’t get the White House to agree to a senior level meeting to discuss election security, for fear of angering Trump. In his waning days as DNI, Coats created a new senior position to track and coordinate responses to foreign influence campaigns and infrastructure attacks, and ordered other agencies in the community to appoint their own senior official to coordinate efforts to protect the 2020 vote. There are good reasons to worry about how that will fare under the new management. Coats’s successor, acting DNI Joseph Maguire, was shown the door prematurely–right after the Election Threats Executive, Shelby Pierson, briefed the House Intelligence Committee that Russia was again interfering in the 2020 campaign to try to help Trump. Pierson still has her job, likely because Senator Burr and Senator Mark Warner, the ranking member of the Intelligence Committee, wrote a letter to Grenell in mid-March warning him against firing anyone else.

The DNI has even more influence shaping analytical priorities and reports, including refereeing internal community debates. The assessment on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign was prepared and submitted by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and one of the goals of Attorney General William Barr’s “investigation of the investigators” appears to be to highlight any analytical differences among the three agencies—CIA, FBI, and NSA—that contributed to the finding, while searching for proof that the Obama White House skewed the report. The DNI also issues the annual Worldwide Threat Assessment. Trump was furious when Coats and CIA Director Gina Haspel presented the public version last year, telling Congress that North Korea was unlikely to give up its nuclear weapons and Iran was not cheating on the nuclear deal. Trump tweeted, “Perhaps Intelligence should go back to school!” This year, officials working for Maguire tried to duck a public briefing to avoid crossing Trump. Congress has yet to see this year’s Threat Assessment, which is supposedly still being edited.

Grenell and Patel may have already influenced one important intelligence product, the assessment of Russia’s intentions for the 2020 campaign. In March 10 briefings on the Hill, intelligence officials said their assessment was that Russia is not trying to help any candidate in the 2020 campaign. Pierson, the top DNI election security official who did the February briefing, was noticeably absent. The New York Times reported that before the March briefing, Grenell’s senior advisor, Patel, met “with intelligence officials and imposed limits on what they could tell Congress.” Intelligence officials interviewed by the Times insisted that the briefing reflected their most recent analysis. Trump certainly felt no reason to keep his heft off the scale, tweeting earlier in the day: “There is another Russia, Russia, Russia meeting today. It is headed up by corrupt politician Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, so I wouldn’t expect too much!” Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the briefing.

Late last week, House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff sent his own letter to Grenell­­—unlike the Senate letter, the ranking member, Devin Nunes, did not co-sign. Schiff, too, warned the acting DNI against making further personnel changes without consulting Congress. The letter condemns as politically motivated Trump’s firing this month of the IC’s inspector general Michael Atkinson (who had the temerity to follow the law and insist on telling Congress about the Ukraine whistleblower’s complaint) and gives Grenell until April 16–today– “to confirm in writing whether you have ever exercised your authority to prohibit Mr. Atkinson . . . ‘from initiating, carrying out, or completing any investigation, inspection, audit or review.’”  I am told that is due diligence, rather than based on information that the IG was fired to squelch yet another investigation.

Grenell has the same deadline to turn over “any and all communication regarding the participation of the [ODNI’s] Director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center” in the March 10 House briefing on Russia “as well as any and all communications regarding the assessment that he presented at the briefing.” The Trump Administration has a long history of stiffing the Intelligence committees on legally mandated reports, including on the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. As of Wednesday, Grenell had not responded to the letter–other than taking to Twitter to accuse Schiff of “politicizing the intelligence community.”

This, of course, is more than your usual DC partisan parlor game. Trump’s browbeating of his own intelligence agencies and his penchant for blurting out secrets on Twitter and in Oval Office meetings has already led close allies to question the reliability of the U.S. intelligence partnership. A DNI seen as irretrievably captive to Trump will do even greater damage to U.S. credibility and increase allies’ concerns about sharing sensitive information. For the many professionals inside the U.S. intelligence community, the spectacle of the DNI being suborned to Trump’s interests is especially corrosive and demoralizing. Zelikow says this couldn’t come at a worse time for the IC, which has spent “years and a lot of work to rebuild tradecraft and the quality and integrity of its analysis after the catastrophic errors we went through with the Iraq War.”

There is still time for Burr, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (who has yet to endorse Ratcliffe) and CIA Director Gina Haspel, who has kept her head down throughout her tenure, to tell President Trump what the Intelligence Community, the country, and Trump personally will lose with a captive DNI. If Trump won’t listen to that truth, then Burr and McConnell need to make clear that they can’t confirm Ratcliffe and can’t work with Grenell. If Trump still won’t budge, they need to make their lack of confidence in both men publicly known. When confronted Trump has a history of blaming others and backing down.

The post Intelligence Failure appeared first on The American Interest.

The Totalitarian Temptation Resisted

“Corona as threat to democracy 2020” triggers countless entries on Google. In the Anglo-American world, the opinion sections run over with pieces like “The Virus Comes for Democracy,“ or “Can the Democracies Survive the Coronavirus?” Paul Krugman, the oracle of the New York Times, reveals to a shuddering audience: “Authoritarianism may be just around the corner.”

Now look across the Atlantic. Europe’s prolific doomsters are hardly known outside America’s postmodern humanities departments. But on the Continent, these opinionators are celebrated as “philosophers,” as purveyors of Insight and Meaning who can see farther than the hoi polloi. Invoking corona, the prominent Italian cultural critic Georgio Agamben knows that “a society . . . in a permanent state of emergency cannot be free.” Ours “has sacrificed freedom for the sake of so-called security reasons, condemning itself to a permanent state of fear and insecurity.”

Another darling of the feuilleton—Europe’s print playground for the intelligentsia—is Slavoj Zizek, a peripatetic seer who teaches between Ljubljana and Seoul. He predicts the “end of the world as we know it.” Only a “new communism” plus global governance can save freedom. An equally voluble German sage orates: “The Western system will become as authoritarian as the Chinese one.” And why? “The ‘securitocracy’ will grab power under the cover of the ‘medicocracy.'”

How do such clairvoyants on either side of the Ocean know when ordinary mortals are not gifted with prescience? Exhibit A is Viktor Orban’s Hungary. The Prime Minister has deployed corona to emasculate the parliament; he now rules by decree—just like Hitler, who rammed the infamous “Enabling Law” through the Reichstag in 1933. 

Running  across the op-ed pages, this indictment has just one little flaw. Hungary’s descent into one-party rule by Orban’s Fidesz dates back to 2011. Corona is but the icing on the Dobos Torte, a Hungarian specialty. Same in Poland, where the Kaczynski brothers began to dismantle the rule of law as early as 2006. To make a simple logical point, corona cannot explain today what was unleashed yesterday.

Germany’s Angela Merkel, France’s Emmanuel Macron, Italy’s Giuseppe Conte, or Britain’s Johnson—leaders of settled democracies—do not copy-cat Orban. How do you stage a putsch in a liberal polity where the habits of democracy are so deeply entrenched and secured by a jealously guarded separation of powers? 

Merkel et al. have decreed painful and economically damaging controls for their citizens, but without battering the constitution. Elections may be postponed for the sake of social distancing. They are not being canceled as a prelude to autocracy. Accuse Donald Trump of blundering and loud-mouthing, of firing ornery officials by the hundreds and relying on agitprop networks to spread fake news. But he cannot be charged with masterminding a creeping coup d’état. Is he going to deputize the National Guard to force governors to open up their states’ economies?

Yes, but. What if the COVID crisis keeps claiming ever more lives? Couldn’t it happen here, to recall Sinclair Lewis’s eponymous semi-satire of 1935, as fascism was raging through Europe? Since the future (outside of fairy tales) is opaque, we might consult history to get a grip on reality. It does not confirm the impending death of liberal democracy. 

Start with the United States, where the number of fatalities has grown into the world’s largest. Add that by custom, Constitution, and law, American presidents enjoy enormous executive privileges compared to other Western governments. And Trump’s predecessors certainly used them copiously in times of national calamity. 

In 1861, Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, a core principle of Anglo-American constitutionalism. A Federal court struck the order down, but Honest Abe ignored it, invoking the enemy inside the gates. Still, the proscription of unlawful imprisonment was back after the Civil War.

After Pearl Harbor, two War Powers Acts gave Franklin D. Roosevelt almost dictatorial prerogatives, leading to censorship and the internment of Japanese-Americans. The Supreme Court got into the act, and in December 1944, FDR rescinded the exclusion order. During the War, the United States turned into a Soviet-style command economy, with the Feds alone taking more than one half of GDP. After 1945, the share fell back to the normal 20 percent. Freed from its shackles, capitalism rebounded with renewed vigor.

In the Korean War, Harry S. Truman nationalized the steel industry. The Supreme Court smacked him down. No, Mr. President, you cannot seize private property without congressional approval. Truman tucked tail.

What about the European democracies? 

Britain: Winston Churchill, the wartime strongman, was promptly deposed in the election of 1945—enough was enough. He spent the next five years in Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. Following re-election in 1951, he resigned peacefully in 1955. Strong democracies have no place for potentates.

Italy: In the 1970s, the terrorist Red Brigades went on a killing campaign. Yet no Mussolini—in spite of 75 murders and 14,000 acts of violence. Today, no Blackshirts roam the land, the hardest-hit victim of COVID-19. Enforcing the shut-down, premier Conte’s Carabinieri respect the rule of law.

Germany: Also in the 70s, the Red Army Faction terrorized Germany, slaying officials and hijacking airliners. Liberty seemed to hang in the balance, and yet chancellor Helmut Schmidt honored the parliament and the constitution. 

In short, national emergencies in the West do not breed despots, nor the grasping security state. But couldn’t it still happen here, as the death toll keeps mounting? Predicting an authoritarian takeover, the merchants of angst ignore four critical points. 

First, the liberal state gives far more than it grabs. In sharp contrast with the 1930s, when mass misery fueled the rise of tyrants, the Western welfare state delivers trillions in cash and liquidity to ease the pain and safeguard the economy’s future. This is supply-side politics to the max. Why, then, hanker for latter-day Benitos or Adolfs?

Second, the so-called security state does not wear jackboots. It is armed not with bayonets, but with the consent of the governed, which is another word for “legitimacy.” Thus, according to an April poll, 93 percent of Germans approve of the partial lock-down. Three out of four Canadians approve the government’s handling of  the crisis. According to Pew, 83 percent of Americans have confidence in their public health officials.

Third, manifest trust does not deliver a blank check, and the elected know it. The check is a loan, imprinted with a warning: “Your emergency powers, as in war, come with a sunset clause. We, the people, are the sovereign. Our prior rights are as unalienable as is the rule of law. We are not selling our birthright for a vaccine.” 

Israel, a beleaguered democracy, nicely underlines such conditionality. In mid-March 73 percent believed that Binyamin Netanyahu was “managing the crisis responsibly.” The next four weeks revealed his machinations to ride to a new term on the back of corona, and the figure dropped by almost 20 points. Meanwhile, the number of those who suspected him of exploiting the crisis “out of political calculations and interests” doubled.

Finally, the freedom of the press. In a real top-down system like China or Hungary, the muzzled media run on the leash of the state. They cannot expose malfeasance or manipulation, nor hold the mighty accountable. In the West, they do. All told, the history of the democratic state and the current facts might suggest to the masters of column-y: “Think again.” Plus: “Argue, don’t insinuate in order to score a quick point in the battle for attention!”

So, when to start wallowing in worry? When the truncheons bang on the media’s doors. When parliaments and courts are neutered. When information is suppressed as in China. Viktor Orban and Xi Jinping are the West’s future only in the imagination of instant-opinionators who would rather be wrong than unheard.

The post The Totalitarian Temptation Resisted appeared first on The American Interest.

Diagnosing America’s Pandemic Response

I once took care of a pregnant woman who needed a Caesarian section for a condition that risked serious hemorrhage. She also suffered from pre-eclampsia, which raises blood pressure. When I told her that she might need a blood transfusion during the operation, she began to cry, while her blood pressure, already quite high, climbed dangerously higher. Although she signed the transfusion release, she moaned with an accent how she wanted to avoid a transfusion if she could. Her husband, a physician, patted her hand and said, “Don’t worry, you won’t need it.” I let the matter drop.

I ordered four units of blood to be brought to the operating room in advance, since the blood bank had recently been moved to a remote corner of the hospital. There had been good reasons for the move, yet a round trip from obstetrics to the blood bank now took 15 minutes. The nurse said the blood wasn’t ready. Nevertheless, the surgeon pushed me to start, as did all the other surgeons waiting impatiently in line to begin their cases. The nurse reassured me that the blood would arrive at any moment. I relented, but I did take the precaution of inserting a second intravenous for an emergency transfusion, although I had no blood on hand with which to transfuse.

Sure enough, the patient started bleeding after she gave birth. I ordered the blood, but it wasn’t ready. Apparently the nurse had mistakenly ordered a type and screen, and not a type and cross. She had corrected her error when her aide had told her, but she also kept quiet about it, fearing she would get into trouble. While I hounded the blood bank to send the blood, I overlooked how much blood the patient kept losing in real time. When the blood units finally arrived, the patient was resigned to the transfusion, but her husband pushed back, invoking the rule that a healthy patient’s hematocrit must drop to 20 before a transfusion. His wife’s hematocrit had started out at 40; by his estimation she wasn’t there yet. He was right about the rule, but I told him that pre-eclampsia patients often have artificially high hematocrits. He had not known this; nevertheless, he doubled down and ordered his wife not to accept the blood. For several minutes I pondered the hematocrit rule, pondered how I could please my patient and her husband, as they were my customers, and even pondered whether it was right for a privileged white male (me) to coax a reluctant Hispanic woman into accepting a transfusion. When the patient’s heart rate began to rise—an early sign of shock—my anesthesiologist’s instincts kicked in. I ordered the husband to leave the room, then quickly transfused four units of blood—two at a time—and not a moment too soon, as the patient’s blood pressure almost collapsed before I hooked up the first bag.

I raise this example because my thinking during the case parallels that of some government officials now tasked with fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. Their thinking operates on a much larger scale, yet the same feelings of perplexity and fear are palpable. All decisions begin in consciousness, and how officials think determines whether their decisions are good or bad. Yet good decisions demand a particular mindset and not just logic. All reasoning is at the mercy of the waves of the sea within us, and those waves include troublesome feelings that are hard to control. In my case those feelings originated in two sources: human nature and ideology. Some of the decisions made by officials during the pandemic suggest the same two confounding influences at work.

There is a future that makes itself, and a future that we make. The real future is composed of both. The future that makes itself, including a pandemic, we can never modify. The future we make is within our grasp to change, but to do so favorably demands that we look at the world with clear eyes. Government officials across the political spectrum have not always done so during the pandemic. I sometimes sense a kind of attentive passivity in them, of the kind I demonstrated in my own case. They are aware of what is happening, but somehow their thoughts seem tied to other forces that come along. Their minds are on the alert, but still vulnerable, a kind of target; they are sensitive, receptive to everything, and therein lies the problem: Their thinking risks succumbing to human nature and ideology.

Human Nature

Dr. Li Wenliang worked at the COVID-19 epicenter in Wuhan, China. In late December last year, he tried to warn colleagues about the new disease, but the authorities reprimanded him for “spreading rumors” and forced him to sign a statement admitting to “illegal behavior.” He himself would later die of the disease.

In the United States, journalists have reported similar pushback against uncomfortable facts. On February 25, when Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease, announced that the outlook for the COVID-19 crisis in the United States looked bleak, reporters say President Trump, who had painted a rosier picture the day before, muzzled her.

It is human nature to prefer stability and routine, and to ignore the uncomfortable detail that may wreck it. Journalists accuse President Trump of dismissing the severity of the coronavirus crisis early on, to avoid hurting the economy. This may be accurate; then again, a leader must think beyond the narrow truth if he or she wants to get large numbers of people beyond officialdom to act in concert. Telling the truth does no good if, in the larger scheme of things, the public’s willingness to act on it has been simultaneously destroyed. Morale may be a matter of indifference to bureaucracies and to the journalists who report on them, but it is a vital consideration for carrying out a national policy. In my own example from the operating room, I held back from aggressively talking to my patient about a blood transfusion to avoid raising her already high blood pressure. Why push the truth if my patient risked growing so anxious that her blood pressure shot up and she suffered a stroke? President Trump may have been in an analogous situation when he downplayed the coronavirus risk, worrying that the subsequent panic could lead to hoarding and mass unemployment, which, in fact, did occur. At the same time, we do not know how well-informed Trump was early on, given journalist reports about how the pandemic crisis unfolded inside officialdom, below the level of the President.

We can, however, glean from those reports evidence of real dysfunction inside officialdom. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) became aware of the epidemic in Wuhan on December 31 and became officially aware, through direct contact with a Chinese official, on January 3. Yet President Trump was not officially informed of the crisis’s severity until January 18, through a phone call with Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Alex Azar, who was apparently less forceful in communicating his concern than he should have been, a point that even journalists who dislike Trump admit. Thus, more than three weeks may have passed before Trump was alerted to the pandemic’s seriousness. During this same period, the CDC was already sending out alerts and monitoring airports. Still, Trump had not been briefed.

We also know from journalist reports that HHS officials were divided early on over whether to get Trump to invoke the Defense Production Act, which would allow the Federal government to commandeer factories to build needed medical supplies. Some aides reportedly saw the policy as too unusual and aggressive, and therefore, almost by definition, bad policy. Events proved them wrong.

This is where the natural human tendency to avoid rocking the boat seems to have caused the greatest damage: not with Trump but inside officialdom. To bring it back to my own example, the nurse kept quiet about the blood bank problem to avoid antagonizing her superiors and to preserve the hospital routine. I behaved similarly to avoid interrupting the hospital routine. The same unwise spirit of motivation seems to have dominated U.S. officialdom. Valuable time was lost as a result.

Some government officials also exhibited the natural human tendency to obsess about one thing to the exclusion of others. Especially during a crisis, the human mind has difficulty changing its focus: It must either apprehend what is near or what is far off; it has difficulty combining the two. I exhibited this tendency when I obsessed about getting blood from the blood bank, while forgetting to keep track of my patient’s ongoing bleeding. Such behavior, often described as the single-track mind, takes other forms in medical practice. For example, many specialists believe, often sincerely, that a sick person suffers from one of the diseases in which they specialize. In a cluster of symptoms, a neurologist will discover a disease of the nerves, while an orthopedic surgeon will find only ailments in his or her own province.

Government officials behaved in analogous fashion when they focused early during the pandemic on evacuating Americans from China, while ignoring the equally important task of building up needed medical supplies. Their imaginations moved along a single groove. That this particular focus grew up around the same time that the National Security Council (NSC) took temporary control of the pandemic issue is no coincidence. Just as a neurologist or an orthopedic surgeon behaves in his or her sphere, an NSC member will tend to look at a crisis through his or her own special lens—in this case, a national security lens rather than a public health lens. Narrow focus revealed itself again when government officials tried to craft a unified approach to the pandemic. According to journalist reports, Treasury officials were most concerned about hurting the economy. Public health officials also gave off the air of siloed people, as they invoked epidemiological models to show why severe restrictions on people’s movements must last for months, seemingly oblivious to the economic collapse and mental health crisis their policies would provoke.

Another error grounded in human nature stems from our tendency to make gestures toward solving a problem—without really solving it. In my case I had inserted a second intravenous for transfusion, and yet I had no blood with which to transfuse. It is human nature to want to feel as if one is “doing something,” although the feeling may be unwarranted.

Early on in the pandemic a variation on this theme occurred. Restrictions were put on people’s movements incrementally—for example, bans on groups larger than 250 people, then larger than 50, and now larger than ten. The gradualism makes no sense, given that an article in Science showed how asymptomatic disease carriers were the infection source for 79 percent of documented cases. The article came out on March 13 but was originally published in MedRxiv on February 17. One of the study’s authors told me it had been given to the CDC at that time. The article showed that healthy people were unknowingly infecting others, which helped to explain the infection’s rapid spread. Its findings recommended stiff restrictions on group size early on. Instead, a more gradual ramping up of the restrictions occurred, as if officials wanted to avoid doing anything too radical, while still “doing something”—just not what was necessary. Slowness can be fatal, in both anesthesiology and pandemics.

Reverence for rules, another tendency in human nature, may have led to a fourth misstep, one that I made in my own case. The rule for transfusing young, healthy patients—waiting for the hematocrit to fall to 20—transfixed me, despite the fact that other evidence recommended an urgent transfusion. True, the rule did not actually contain the word “forbidden”; nevertheless, it did not include any exceptions. I lost a valuable five minutes letting it restrain the natural agility of my thoughts.

Some CDC officials testing people for the coronavirus may have suffered a similar lapse in judgment. Early on, the guidelines for who should be tested were quite narrow and included only people with respiratory symptoms who had either been in close contact with an infected person or had traveled to China. Another rule at the time was that only the CDC could conduct approved tests. The first rule failed to take into account the possibility that Americans without links to China or without close contact with obviously infected people might nevertheless be infected, and that there might be multiple routes of transmission, which later proved to be the case. In the second case, the early CDC test for coronavirus falsely flagged the presence of other viruses, and not just the coronavirus, which led to the rule restricting the number of state labs that could use the test. Both rules were eventually revised, to such a degree that the CDC no longer even tracks how many tests are being performed, but crucial weeks were lost because of the bureaucracy’s reverence for rules, as it delayed widespread surveillance testing that might have shown the enormous scale of the infection early on, along with the important hotspots. Indeed, by showing that massive numbers of people had already been infected with coronavirus and suffered only minor illness, the ensuing panic might have been less, since, by enlarging the denominator, the calculated mortality rate for coronavirus would have fallen. Panic drives bad policy.

A variation on this error occurred at the FDA, which blocked the rollout of mass testing through its rule that labs developing their own tests had to essentially use a live virus sample in order for their tests to be FDA-certified. Many labs had trouble finding such a sample precisely because the virus had not yet swept through their regions. Testing at the outbreak’s early stage might have helped these regions to contain the disease, but being at an early stage in the outbreak, and therefore without access to a live virus sample, worked against them. It was a kind of Catch-22: The absence of an outbreak in their region made impossible the test that could preserve the absence of an outbreak. The FDA later relaxed this criterion, but valuable time was lost.

The natural tendency to avoid rocking the boat aggravated this misstep. By various avenues, the CDC tried to get a sample of live coronavirus from China, to help U.S. companies develop their own coronavirus tests. At every juncture the Chinese authorities blocked the transfer. Curiously, according to journalist reports, government officials never asked Trump to intervene with President Xi. Again, one senses a desire not to upset the applecart, and to avoid trouble. Again, valuable time was lost.

The rigid adherence to rules can be found elsewhere at the FDA. Surgical masks were (and still are) in short supply, yet the FDA failed to waive some of the restrictions on their production until March 26—two months after the first coronavirus case in Washington state was confirmed. N95 respirator masks are produced for both medical use and construction-industry use, but more regulations burden the makers of the former—for example, special tests of flammability and strength—because of their medical classification. The slowness in waiving these regulations is inexplicable.

Compare this 60-day delay after the first coronavirus case in the United States with the first 30 days after the attack on Pearl Harbor. By the end of December 1941, not only had the Federal government ordered Detroit car manufacturers to immediately stop car production and build military airplanes, but it had also given those companies permission to use fabricated car parts when doing so. Government officials lifted regulations in a common sense way. Rather than dither over a regulation’s fine points, they took action.

That a rule has a steadying influence on people, especially on those who feel a bit shaky professionally, is human nature, especially when the rule has detailed instructions for how to proceed and likely penalties if those instructions are ignored. A rule on one side and a threat on the other. Reverence for rules is a curious trait in human nature, of the kind that leads to idolatry. People hate to live in doubt, and so they create a binding rule to tell them what to do and how to live. Once the rule is created, people forget that the rule was of their own making and something that can be amended. They simultaneously worship the rule and fear flouting it. Not only does following the rule ease their doubts about what course of action to take, it also absolves them of guilt if things go wrong later. At the same time people fear repercussions if they disobey the rule. A good government official needs the inner strength to resist falling in love with a rule.

Another misstep originating in human nature involves people’s tendency to overlook vital details amid the everyday activities of life. I committed this error when I allowed my patient’s husband to come into the operating room and sit by his wife. In the back of my mind I sensed he might cause trouble if an emergency transfusion were needed, but I let things slide because he was her husband and it seemed natural to let him into the room. I could have easily invented a rationale for keeping him out—I had done so in other cases—but I let it go. It was a mistake.

An analogous event may have occurred early on in the pandemic. A whistleblower reported that workers in HHS’s Administration for Children and Families greeted infected Americans flown back from Wuhan face-to-face. One incident was captured on video. The workers were not trained in infection control, yet their duties were inherently kindly and seemingly harmless, and so it should not surprise that officials overlooked how they might impetuously greet infected Americans, thereby becoming infected themselves. We do not know how many such events occurred. Probably some. Yet good government officials do not overlook such details. Rather than enjoy knowledge from afar when making policy, they also enter into it. They focus on details. Doing so takes effort; going through details can be a tiresome and complicated task. In addition, just thinking about restraining people from hugging, greeting, and enjoying each other’s company at an airport is repellant to human nature. Yet methodical work and victory after victory in a crisis’s smallest aspects, including overcoming the gravitational pull of human nature, are what successful policies turn on.

Ideology

The Trump Administration made a good decision at the end of January when it blocked Chinese nationals from coming to the United States. It also required American citizens returning from China to be held in quarantine for 14 days upon arrival. The ban bought the country time to prepare. Several European countries failed to restrict incoming travel from China with the same rapidity, especially Italy, which may have suffered as a result. The earliest COVID-19 cases in Italy included Chinese nationals visiting from Wuhan, and Italians returning from a visit to Wuhan in early February. Yet Trump’s decision provoked charges of xenophobia and racism, including from leading Democratic presidential candidates Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. Major media players such as Vox also accused the administration of racism, although Vox (and Joe Biden) later recanted when the pandemic’s seriousness became evident.

More troubling than politicians governed by ideology are government officials guided by ideology. True, no officials are on record as having opposed the travel ban, but the pushback against the ban heard from various public health and academic legal authorities—the kinds of people who naturally populate government agencies—raises an eyebrow. For example, one epidemiologist said the ban came too late and that it was more of an “emotional or political reaction,” implying the ban’s purpose might have been to appease xenophobes. Another epidemiologist said the ban may have been appropriate, but also that Trump did not take advantage of the time the move may have bought him. The second epidemiologist may be right; still, one senses in his criticism another, hidden purpose—to delegitimize Trump by another route. A global health law expert condemned the Trump ban from a third angle, calling it a civil rights violation.

If a man adopts a belief system, then discovers that his belief system prevents him from supporting a travel ban put in place by a regime he despises, would not a hundred good reasons occur to him for doubting the value of that travel ban? One way or another, progressives and purportedly neutral authorities with a progressive bent took issue with Trump’s travel ban. It was either too closely associated with Trump’s earlier bans on Muslim (and non-Muslim) immigration, or simply the policy of someone they disliked.

Free market conservatives may have exhibited similar prejudice. For example, the libertarian Cato Institute, which supports open borders, disliked the China travel ban and recommended alternatives. In a related example, the president of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, a non-profit organization dedicated to entwining the U.S. and Chinese economies, and supported by major international business and financial leaders, said Trump pushed too far when criticizing China for misleading the world about COVID-19. He said, “We should be cooperating at a time when China has learned a lot about this virus, and instead we’re engaging in this name calling,” before adding, “The nationalism it’s stoked in China is terrible” (my italics).

It is worrisome to think that government officials, whether progressive or conservative, who subscribe to a belief system that espouses open borders, may hesitate in the future to support a vital travel ban in a pandemic, especially if put in place by an administration they hate. I recognize the bad precedent a travel ban sets. I also recognize the unease that progressives and free market conservatives feel about supporting President Trump on anything. But is it wise, out of devotion to ideology, to set loose a present and certain evil (a dangerous virus) to avoid an evil that is both in the future and uncertain (permanently closed borders)? In the same vein, is it wise for career government officials to have strong feelings about the administrations they work for? Ideologues hate or adore political leaders, as all people do, but sometimes they do so in good faith rather than good sense. They earnestly believe in their ideologies. Yet everything that is earnest is not always true. Error is often more earnest than truth.

I made an analogous mistake when I hesitated to transfuse my Hispanic patient to avoid crossing an ideological line (in my case, identity politics ideology). I did not imagine myself to be under the spell of an ideology while doing so. I thought I was reasoning clearly. This is how ideologues usually think. They think other people have ideologies but not them. They even imagine themselves to be free thinkers, if not outright rebels, and independent of surrounding influences. In fact, their ideology represents an acute form of prejudice, their rebelliousness a form of servility.

An excessive regard for consumers offers another example of ideology at work during the pandemic. Until only very recently, government officials had hesitated to ask Americans to wear masks or face coverings in public, and still have not forced them to do so. Good reasons existed for their hesitation. For example, special N95 masks should be conserved for health care workers. In addition, face coverings may give people a false sense of security, causing them to social distance less. Yet government officials also seem loath to inconvenience people, as if doing so risked violating some social contract. In fact, it does, which is the problem.

Again, my surgical case provides a template for what is going on. I did not want to antagonize my patient and her husband by pushing for a blood transfusion, because I saw her as a consumer whom I had to please, rather than as a patient I should treat using my expertise. In the medical profession’s old model of expertise, the doctor tells the patient what the patient needs; in today’s business model, the patient is a “consumer” who tells the doctor, now just a “service provider,” what he or she wants. The business model has found its way into other areas of life—for example, in colleges, where students become “customers” who tell their professors, now providers, what they want to study.

An added twist comes in the form of an unwritten social contract between Americans and their government, in which government reserves for itself the major decisions in public life, free of democratic interference, while, as recompense, citizens become consumers who surrender their influence on public policy in exchange for more freedom and “choice” in private life. Philosopher Alasdair Macintyre calls this arrangement “bureaucratic individualism.”

Instead of forcing everyone to wear masks in public to cut down on viral transmission, Federal officials prefer to keep the practice voluntary. They seem almost afraid to force “consumers” to do anything. Even President Trump said, “I don’t think they’ll [masks] be mandatory because some people don’t want to do that.” In other words, compulsory mask wearing risks violating people’s lifestyle choices, which is enough to kill the policy. In New York City, where mask wearing has become compulsory, Mayor Bill de Blasio tried to sweeten the command with an appeal to consumer taste. “This is a face covering. It could be a scarf, it could be a bandana, something you create yourself” (my italics), he declared, as if turning the facemask into an expression of individuality somehow preserves the unwritten social contract that guarantees freedom in private life. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti seemed to be working the same angle when he said of facemasks, “This will be the look.” Yet good government officials do not let public policy during a pandemic ride on whether Americans can be persuaded to believe it complements their freedom of choice in lifestyle. They do not let the ideology of bureaucratic individualism guide them.

Another ideology that distorts official thinking might be called “scientism,” or faith in science, although the problem is more specific: an unswerving faith in the scientific method. The scientific method remains the basis for all scientific inquiry, but it has defects that government officials seem to have overlooked during the early stage of the crisis, most likely because of their fervent belief in the method.

The defects in the scientific method are threefold. First, the scientific method is one of intentional ignorance. It demands that investigators focus on certain chosen details, isolate them, and leave out all the rest. This means investigators reach conclusions by looking at only a small portion of the facts. Second, in isolating such details and supposing such isolation to be accurate, investigators suppose what is false. Third, the scientific method encourages investigators to transcend individual details and to substitute generalizations that are convenient for thought, but which are nothing more than phantoms. The phantoms are then confused with real existence.

Some government officials seem to have ignored these defects and accepted pandemic research uncritically simply because it used the scientific method. Take, for example, the Imperial College study that predicted up to 2.2 million American deaths in the United States unless intense restrictions were put on people’s behavior. The study caused sudden and dramatic shifts in U.S. policy, in the form of lockdowns, which even the study itself did not call for. We see the effects of these changes now in the form of a collapsing economy. Although the study used the scientific method, what variables it included and which ones it left out remain a mystery to this day. When asked, the study’s lead investigator admitted the computer code used to construct the study was 13 years old, with thousands of lines of code being “undocumented,” making it hard for anyone to work with, let alone identify potential errors in. The code remains unpublished. The code used for a more optimistic study out of Oxford also remains unpublished. Yet U.S. government officials seem to live by these studies, rather than to view them with the critical detachment they deserve, causing them to swing from policy to policy, or to give people a sense that policy is being made on an ad hoc basis. Sometimes it seems as if only the most recent scientific study catches their ear, displacing all prior findings. When divisions occur within officialdom, the studies themselves can become useful supports for a pre-determined ideological position—for example, those who want to open all borders cite one study, while those who want to close all borders cite another. Ideologues harness an ingrained bias toward the scientific method to serve their larger ideological bias.

In the case of the Imperial College study, whose conclusions were embraced almost reflexively, officials did not seem to wonder about the variables intentionally ignored, or what generalizations the study relied on as a substitute for real-life details. For example, the study assumed that only a small portion of the population had been infected with coronavirus, yet this was inaccurate. It also assumed that society was static and incapable of increasing the number of ICU beds available in hospitals. This was also inaccurate. Again, officialdom’s belief in the study, and the almost 180 degree turn in policy the study prompted, hints at a reflexive bias in favor of anything that smacks of the scientific method. The more recent doubts expressed in officialdom toward the study—for example, the study’s high number of predicted deaths—do not undo the economic damage already done by the intense lockdowns that grew out of the study but that, as noted above, even the study itself did not recommend.

Officialdom’s unswerving devotion to the scientific method is captured in an epidemiologist’s description of events early on during the crisis. Dr. Marc Lipsitch, director of Harvard University’s Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, said, “They [the government] contacted us, I think, on a Tuesday a week ago, and asked for answers and feedback by Thursday, basically 24 hours. My initial response was we can’t do it that fast. But we ended up providing them some numbers responding to very specific scenarios.” The whole experience was described by the reporter as “a rushed affair.”

Ideology made this possible. The ideologue flies beyond territory that has yet to be colonized by careful observation. His or her belief system allows decisions to be made with haste because generalizations sweep past details; in ideology, a single study that relies on only a few variables is presumed to represent with sufficient exactitude a very complex situation. It explains why the ideologue so often fails in real life. The ideologue thinks, but thinking is easy; putting thoughts into action is much harder, because the world is not as simple as the scientific method makes it out to be. Real life presents innumerable variables and details that must be accounted for, which is why it is easier to write ten books of philosophy than it is to put one principle into practice.

How unsurprising, then, that officialdom, so steeped in ideology, missed so many obvious details early on in the pandemic. Officialdom revered a sweeping study based on the scientific method, yet ignored basic truths about human nature when crafting policy. It imposed harsh restrictions on the population, but forgot that a panicked people will converge on hospital ER departments, all at the same time, if no separate field hospitals have been built beforehand to receive them, causing people to come into close contact with one another and catch the very disease they might have avoided. It revered the scientific method but forgot the well-known fact that communist regimes conceal the truth to bolster their public image. Until very recently, officialdom accepted at face value the Chinese government’s rosy reports about the pandemic’s pace and range in that country. Even as late as January 14, the Chinese government was saying no clear evidence of human transmission of coronavirus existed. Yet officialdom still trusted them.

A Better Bureaucracy

In December 2019, political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote an essay in support of the “deep state,” arguing that we needed less political patronage and more non-partisan professionalism in the Federal bureaucracies. At first, I disagreed with his essay. The essay came out only a few weeks after the Horowitz report exposed serious deficiencies in FBI and FISA court behavior during the Trump Russia-collusion investigation. If anything, we needed a downsized administrative state, I thought. In addition, the concept of a professionalized bureaucracy seemed anti-democratic to me, as it implies that average people cannot do “the people’s business.” However, officialdom’s missteps during the pandemic have caused me to change my mind. I now think Fukuyama was more right than wrong. Complex public health problems in an interconnected world alone demand a professionalized administrative state.

Although Fukuyama rebukes the critics of the administrative state—as, to his mind, the rule of law depends on its existence—he and his critics do have more in common than he might imagine. For the critics, too, dislike the administrative state, at least as presently constructed, with its lack of professionalism that has led to some very bad outcomes over the past 40 years. Higher education has awarded hundred of thousands of advanced degrees to future government officials, including credentials that supposedly attest to their professionalism. But in economics, these same officials made decisions that led to the destruction of the American working class; in education, they made decisions that led to decades of declining test scores; in foreign policy, they made decisions that led to the Iraq war and the shortsighted embrace of China; in law enforcement, they made unethical investigative decisions at the FBI and CIA; in health care, they made decisions that practically destroyed the individual health insurance market; and now, in public health, they have made decisions that have risked worsening the pandemic. It is a system-wide failure. No wonder the public distrusts the administrative state.

Yet the problem is not the administrative state so much as the people who staff that state. Officialdom lacks professionalism, as Fukuyama argues, although by professionalism I mean the ability to resist the gravitational pull of human nature and ideology. Graduate schools that churn out these future officials need to change their selection methodology. For example, they emphasize grades and test scores in their applicants, and even experience and special knowledge, but this is not enough to produce a professional. That background alone is more akin to that of a “fine administrator.” A fine administrator prefers to do what he or she has always been doing, a bit more or a bit less but always in the same way. A fine administrator excels in pulling things together without suggesting anything new, and doing so without upsetting the applecart. A fine administrator spends more time juggling different interests to smooth over controversies without stepping on anyone’s toes. A fine administrator is often the person who stays out of trouble and keeps a lid on everything. Such behavior, perfectly consistent with human nature—and good grades and test scores—is not consistent with professionalism.

These same schools also look favorably on politically engaged applicants, especially on those who subscribe to particular ideologies, such as identity politics and social justice on the left, or, in other schools, free market or social conservatism on the right. There are also those applicants who subscribe to scientism and bureaucratic individualism. Yet the ideologue is not a professional. For ideologues, everything that is in agreement with their belief system seems true; everything that is not puts them in a rage. This makes for bad decision-making, as some decision-making during the pandemic attests. In the future, it would be better if training programs show a preference for applicants who have no interest in politics or ideology at all, on either end of the political spectrum.

No one is to blame for the initial mask shortage or the lack of testing kits and ventilators at the outset of the COVID-19 crisis, for no one has enough prescience (and money) to plan for every conceivable national emergency. Our sight doesn’t extend that far, no matter how great our knowledge is. It is why so many of the most important events to happen in life are unforeseen and unforeseeable. South Korea, for example, was prepared with test kits only because it had been unprepared for the MERS coronavirus outbreak in 2015, which hit that country hard. South Korea learned the hard way, by experience, as all people do; it struggled then much as the United States is doing now. Instead, our focus should be on the missteps made after the pandemic began, inside officialdom, how human nature and ideology may have stirred government officials emotionally, prejudicing their thoughts and leading to bad decisions, and how we might improve things going forward.

The post Diagnosing America’s Pandemic Response appeared first on The American Interest.

How China’s Mask Diplomacy Backfired

After letting the novel coronavirus loose on the world, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is now making its case for global leadership. The Chinese Embassy in Rome claims to have donated 2 million masks, along with ventilators and protective suits, to Italy. China reportedly provided Spain with medical aid and advisors. A CCP-friendly Chinese-Malaysian outlet proclaimed that China was donating 10 million masks to Malaysia. 

Chinese state media has emphasized the purported strength of the CCP’s response, using this new “Health Silk Road” to portray China as a trustworthy torchbearer amid a crisis that is engulfing the West. And while this narrative has found purchase in mainstream Western media, many claims of Chinese charity are easily debunked. China is not donating but selling ventilators, face masks, COVID-19 tests, and other medical supplies to Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, Indonesia, Malaysia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Northern Ireland, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Brazil, Japan, Mexico, Qatar, Serbia, and Austria, among other countries. Meanwhile, many of these supplies are defective.

China, however, is not the only country to show some altruism: Leaders in Washington, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, and Hanoi have all donated supplies to countries in need. And while the United States’s domestic response has been poor, this impacts only Americans; it is not U.S. lies that allowed the virus to spread, nor are American medical materials failing abroad. It’s apparent, despite prominent Western claims to the opposite effect, that China’s coronavirus-era diplomacy evinces no epochal shift to Chinese global leadership. On the contrary, the coronavirus crisis may wake the world up to the CCP’s defects, fatally undermining Beijing’s campaign for international authority.

As the virus began to spread in Wuhan, the CCP repressed medical professionals who raised the alarm. State media for months ignored the virus’s spread. China, rather than buy the world time, as a recent New York Times opinion piece proclaimed, allowed the virus’s spread, preventing the world from hoping to eliminate or even contain the pandemic. 

Still, the CCP is now trying to take a public victory lap—all while wielding the West’s economic decline to seek more foreign direct investment, seize market share in critical industries, and stop the West from confronting its bad behavior. Publicly, however, Beijing is presenting a politics of generosity, donating or selling necessary goods to a world reeling from the CCP’s failures. 

China, despite hoarding medical supplies in February, controls the means of medical production: The country produced half of the world’s masks before the coronavirus’s emergence, and it has expanded production nearly 12-fold since then. China accounts for 40 percent of the world’s imports of face shields, protective garments and equipment, gloves, and goggles. And while China’s exports of protective equipment fell in early 2020, this drop was not as precipitous as feared. The country is now ramping up production of medical supplies and pharmaceutical ingredients, according to Horizon Advisory, a consultancy that tracks Chinese government and economic activity. 

“It is possible to turn the crisis into an opportunity,” Han Jian of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and director of the Ministry of Civil Affairs’s China Industrial Economics Association wrote on March 4, according to Horizon. “To increase the trust and the dependence of all countries around the world of ‘Made in China.’”

This effort is not exactly opaque. 

In late March, the Chinese government made the first move in Helsinki, approaching their Finnish counterparts and offering to sell protective face masks. State-friendly media Xinhua on March 28 extolled the Chinese government for doing the same in Croatia, “offer[ing] convenience for it to purchase medical supplies from China”; on March 30, 12.5 tons of Chinese medical equipment arrived in Zagreb.

China has already sold $467 million in medical supplies to Spain, a million face masks and 100 testing kits to Slovakia, three million face masks, protective gear, and 86 ventilators to Hungary, 17 tons of medical supplies to Indonesia, and 150,000 testing kits to the Czech Republic. 

And while Chinese businessman Jack Ma appears to actually be donating medical goods across the Global South, the CCP is trying to take credit for this generosity by labeling him “China’s Jack Ma.” The CCP’s efforts to claim Ma seem to stem from the failures of official state sales and donations. 

To export certain types of masks to the United States, both the masks and the Chinese company must meet National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health requirements. International law firm Harris Bricken says that about 90 percent of the certifications they have seen so far were fake.

Issues of this sort are evident across the globe.

Some 80 percent of the masks the Czech Republic purchased from China for around $600,000 are defective. Chinese rapid-testing kits sold to Spain had only 30 percent sensitivity, as opposed to the 80 percent level expected. (The Chinese government sought to separate itself from the company in question, claiming the tests were not approved for exports.) The Netherlands has since recalled 600,000 defective masks it purchased from China. Turkey recently rejected an unknown number of Chinese testing kits after they yielded inaccurate results. Georgia suspended its agreement with a Chinese company after receiving 1,000 substandard rapid-testing kits.

Similar failures are evident even in Beijing’s gifts. China donated 100,000 test kits to the Philippines, which soon after discarded those that were only 40 percent accurate. Given that many of the recipients of China’s benefactions—such as those in Phnom Penh, Tehran, Caracas, and beyond—are either autocratic or politically unstable, it’s evident that China’s deficiencies could remain under wraps. It’s unclear, for instance, what or how many supplies China gave Iran, but the Islamic Republic will not dare to publicly admit their likely inadequacy. The world is unlikely to ever know the breadth of China’s exported negligence, but contemporary reports seem to be only the tip of the iceberg.

This is a standard struggle for China and one that constantly undermines its global efforts. Members of the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s Marshall Plan-like state-backed global investment and marketing campaign, are constantly frustrated by the poor quality goods and derelict firms that China sends their way. The CCP, however, is sticking to its playbook as the pandemic rages, seeking to enhance China’s global clout by exporting or donating goods of which it has a domestic overcapacity.

But China is not the only country offering assistance. France sent 1 million masks and 200,000 protective suits to Italy; an aide to French President Emmanuel Macron later chastised China-praising Italian leaders for “EU-bashing.” (Italian opposition politician Matteo Salvini, on the other hand, described China’s response to the outbreak as a “crime against humanity.”) Germany donated medical supplies to Italy, also taking patients from that country and France. In relative silence, France and Germany have given more masks to Italy than China sold to that country.

The United States, meanwhile, promised up to $100 million of aid to China and other countries affected by the pandemic. The State Department in February donated nearly 18 tons of medical supplies to China, including masks, gowns, gauze, and respirators. Around the same time, Canada sent some 50,000 face shields and other materials—from the country’s own reserves—to China. Japan donated 3 million masks to China, while Japanese companies and cities also sent supplies.

South Korea and Taiwan have donated or pledged to donate masks to the United States, as well as tests to the Philippines and the United Arab Emirates. Singapore sent 3,000 test kits and other supplies to the Philippines. The European Union days ago announced a €93 million package to help Serbia fight coronavirus—even after Belgrade jubilantly received Chinese experts. Austria is sending 1.6 million masks to Italy. Vietnam offered $200,000 in medical aid to Cambodia and Laos. Vladimir Putin’s Russia donated 1,500 test kits to North Korea, while Communist Cuba sent doctors to Italy. 

Complaints about these donations, like those that dog China, have yet to surface. 

The CCP’s so-called “mask diplomacy” is evidently having at best only moderate success. What’s more, in Africa and the Middle East, the virus’s Chinese origins are fueling a “counter-narrative to the official version of China as a development model and emerging public goods provider.”

The world may welcome China’s masks and tests, but reports of their failure will certainly not prevent leaders of already China-skeptical countries from seeking accountability for the CCP’s exacerbation of this catastrophe. This crisis could even prompt some to reconsider their Chinese alliances. 

Indeed, the CCP cannot even tamp down domestic fury; its diplomatic efforts will certainly not instill global acceptance of a “Made in China” world now. 

“China started this crisis. But now, they are selling medical equipment, testing kits, masks and emerging as some sort of heroes that will save us all. China is selling. Let me underline the sale part here,” Lídia Pereira, a Portuguese member of the European Parliament, recently tweeted. “China is not saving us by selling bad quality equipment.”

The post How China’s Mask Diplomacy Backfired appeared first on The American Interest.

Robert B. Zoellick: “We Tried Autarky in the 1930s. It Didn’t Work Very Well”

TAI’s Jeffrey Gedmin recently spoke with Robert B. Zoellick—former President of the World Bank (2007-2012), U.S. Deputy Secretary of State (2005-2006), and U.S. Trade Representative (2001-2005)—about the coronavirus pandemic, relations with China, and his upcoming book about the history of American foreign policy. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Jeffrey Gedmin for TAI: Bob, we know you as a voracious reader, so we’re curious—what are you reading these days, and what books do you recommend from the last quarter or so?

Robert R. Zoellick: Well, I’m reading two very different books. I’ve gone back to Sir Michael Howard’s translation, with Peter Paret, of Clausewitz’s On War. I’ve never read it cover to cover, and I’m enjoying that while also trying to think about its possible applications to diplomacy. The other book is The Virginian by Owen Wister, from 1902, an early Western novel, which my wife recommended. I’m reading The Virginian in part because the author was a very good friend of Teddy Roosevelt. I’m getting a little feel of the West as T.R. must have thought about it.

There are two other recent books that I would recommend. One is Narrative Economics by Robert Shiller at Yale. It’s within the framework of behavioral economics; he’s trying to explore how the spread of people’s stories affect economic behavior. In some ways it’s extraordinarily timely, because while Shiller wrote the book ahead of coronavirus, he uses epidemiology as the method to understand how stories spread. It’s an early effort to understand how mass psychology shapes economic behavior. Shiller reviews eight or nine common arguments about how people perceive the economy—which prompts reflection, because you see how these ideas recur time and time again.

The other book is also short. Eric Foner, the historian of Reconstruction, published a book last year called The Second Founding. It’s a history of the Reconstruction amendments—13, 14, and 15—the Civil Rights Acts, and then the judicial treatment of those provisions. Foner offers a perspective on how the rights revolution of that era was turned back by court rulings. His history of the Reconstruction amendments, the debates in Congress, and the divisions in the country is fascinating.

TAI: Speaking of recurring ideas, Tony Judt once said it’s a strange conceit that we have, thinking that each and every moment we experience is unique to us. Is this a distinctly American thing about forgetting and neglecting history? Or is it something broader?

RBZ: The core problem is people’s lack of historical perspective and knowledge. I don’t find that only a U.S. phenomenon. Other countries, as part of their political culture, have their own view of history. One that’s become prominent in recent years is the Chinese view of a “century of humiliation,” which a number of recent historians have reviewed critically, considering the Taiping Rebellion and other aspects of the 19th century and recognizing a far more complex interaction between China and the outside world.

But historical arguments often make for effective advocacy. So if you’re trying to attack corporate America, or you’re trying to attack unions—I’m not sure that people can trace it, but they’re drawing upon arguments that have been used before. With monetary policy, at least in our history, it reaches back to William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech in 1896, or maybe even Alexander Hamilton! These ideas and experiences are diamonds in the rough that people rediscover and reuse.

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Robert B. Zoellick (Wikimedia Commons)

A better sense of history offers one a deeper understanding of how these themes have been used, how they arose, how they may or may not give guidance today. As a lover of history, I am cautious of the overuse of analogies because I think analogies can mislead as much as they clarify. But history certainly presents questions for you to think about and ask so as to better understand the present.

TAI: Now, in the midst of this public health crisis, we’re trying to get the balance right between protecting public health and minimizing damage to the economy. And China figures majorly in the debate. On the one hand, we now have an emergence of China hawks who talk about “hard decoupling” with China; on the other hand, some like Mike McFaul have called for working with China. How do you see the debate evolving, and what guidance would you offer policymakers?

RBZ: Well, a word first on the public health and the economy. I hope we can reach some sensible reconciliation, because the two obviously have to be synchronized. The big challenge is the sequencing. The first order is making sure that front-line medical personnel have what they need in terms of equipment, intensive care beds, and so on; otherwise, they’re overwhelmed, the economy is stressed and can’t revive. The role of testing is critical, so that you can get the data to make assessments of risks. And over time, the testing will need to identify people with immunities. Because as you turn to a recovery stage, you’ll have different protections and risks for different groups. I think that public health planning versus economics is a false choice; they need to work together.

From a political standpoint, President Trump’s instincts told him to appeal to people who wanted a return to normalcy, people who need the wages or wanted to get out of the house. And even as he dials back that position, that intuition will resonate with some people. Now he does run the risk, as some Republicans in Congress are warning him, that he’ll look insensitive to deaths. There are always politics involved.

One of the best pieces that I’ve read came out of AEI. It’s a report by Scott Gottlieb, the former Commissioner of the FDA. The report points to different phases. I think it’s natural, whenever you have a crisis, that people rush to the ramparts to deal with the immediate challenge, but we’re now moving into a phase where people need to think about synchronization and sequencing.

To turn to China, can China and the United States cooperate? They are competitors and at times lapse into acrimony. They reflect different values as societies. And maybe a subsidiary question, is cooperation vital or at least important?

I would offer three lines of inquiry here. One, over the past year or so, a new conventional wisdom has crept in, which is that cooperation failed. That is flat wrong. People may now realize the difficulties and differences we’ve had with China, but to assume that cooperation failed is ahistorical. I discussed some of this in a recent article. Just consider, for example, the proliferation of missiles and weapons of mass destruction. China was one of the worst offenders through the ’70s and ’80s. It facilitated some of the programs in Pakistan and beyond. But starting with Secretary Baker’s visit in 1991, to put relations back on track after Tiananmen Square, the Chinese started to abide by the Missile Technology Control Regime, banned tests, and signed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty (although because we haven’t ratified, China hasn’t ratified). Ask yourself how you’re going to deal with problems like Iran and North Korea without China; well, you don’t get very far.

More broadly, in the security area, between 2000 and 2018 China agreed with 182 of 190 UN Security Council resolutions on sanctions for violators of international standards. Now, in some of these cases the United States had to work hard to bring China along. But on an issue that I dealt with extensively over 10 years ago, Darfur, China actually turned out to be quite helpful. China is also quite active in peacekeeping. In terms of global growth, China went from a 10 percent current account surplus to zero—that means all added demand. China was the fastest destination for U.S. exports for 15 years. They no longer undervalue their exchange rate. They played an important role in the global financial crisis with the largest global stimulus. When Russia suggested dumping dollars, the Chinese thought that wasn’t a very good idea. Their cooperation with the IMF and the World Bank was excellent. When I was president of the World Bank, I had no difficulty with China across a broad range of issues.

Even on the much debated question of their WTO accession, China performed pretty well where there were quantitative or numerical obligations. When it came to things like enforcement of intellectual property rights protections, which are harder to measure, that’s where you had greater differences. But the real problem with the WTO was that it wasn’t able to keep up with new and better rules for different circumstances, whether state-owned enterprises or services or different types of technology, or even in the environmental sphere. I’m active in animal conservation communities, which were very excited about China’s ban of elephant ivory. The Chinese netizens went after shark fin soup. On the other hand, China is not doing enough to preserve the 3,700 tigers left in the wild. You can’t deal with climate change without China.

The point is not that all is well. I’m not trying to sweep things under the rug. There are significant differences. But if one starts with the assumption that cooperation never worked, you’re misleading yourself, and misleading yourself in policy is a very dangerous course.

The second line of inquiry is that many of the critics or the “decouplers” are missing the real strategic challenge with China. Evan Feigenbaum of the Carnegie Endowment was the first person to bring this to my attention. China has a two-track approach. On the one hand, as I pointed out in the “Responsible Stakeholder” speech in 2005, China is already integrated, whether it’s in the IMF, World Bank, UN Security Council, or treaty protocols. So the question is behavior. On this first track, China is trying to nudge the existing institutions in the direction of their interests and norms of behavior. This isn’t really a shock. All countries try to do it, including the United States. But it does lead one to ask, “What is the United States doing in these institutions to try to promote its interest and values—or is it abandoning them?”

The second track, however, is worth noting. China is preparing the option of “globalization with Chinese characteristics.” This is very much at the forefront of the response to the pandemic. The Belt and Road is an example of their model of growth through infrastructure development. Another Chinese concept revives China’s view of China as the “Middle Kingdom,” with relations with tributary states. The idea of globalization with Chinese characteristics is that China will offer economic benefits, it will offer connectivity, trade, and investment, but one has to treat China with a certain respect and deference as a tributary state. And you certainly don’t criticize the Chinese Communist Party.

If the United States wants to compete, we can’t beat something with nothing. So the idea that we would move to an autarkic system and simply look at the world transactionally, that we disparage allies, that we undermine existing institutions like the WTO—that leaves the U.S. less able to do what it’s been quite good at over 70 years, which is building coalitions, having the world look at the United States as a model, even if there are differences.

So if you ask the hawks, as you refer to them, “What is your strategy?” you don’t hear much of an answer. Containment clearly doesn’t work, nor do old geopolitical concepts of balance of power. What does balancing mean in a world of pandemics or financial crises or environmental issues or proliferation?

And that leads to my third line of inquiry which is, can you cooperate with a country that’s got a different value system? Xi Jinping’s effort to revive the Chinese Communist Party and strengthen its role has highlighted that problem. Here, one can look to Ronald Reagan for a model. Reagan cooperated with Gorbachev, but he also had no hesitation about standing up for our beliefs. The starting point is our own work at home. And the more we emphasize an open society—open to trade and ideas and people and investment—the more appealing we’re going to be to the world. Certainly, we should stand for the free flow of information and for our values. We should push more for information and reporting on China. Part of Reagan’s method was that he didn’t use his presentation of America’s values as an insult. Instead, he used it as an aspiration. In his private conversations with Gorbachev and others, he said, “You know that your people want to have religious freedom. I understand the difficulty in the past, but how can we create openings for freedom?”

Today we are just gratuitously insulting China. It boggles my mind when I see that the United States, Chair of the G7, that our Secretary of State refused to reach a common agreement with the six other democracies because he wanted to call it the Wuhan virus. That’s petty and petulant. One can recognize the differences with China, the conflicts with China, the disagreements with China. But is name calling going to solve your problem? One thing that’s sure is that increasing tariffs and doing phony trade deals is not going to solve the problem.

TAI: There is on both the right and the left a growing conviction that globalization went too far: Free trade had major blind spots, and there’s a need to realign. How would you summarize lessons learned from recent years? Is there any area where the Trumpists or the Bernie Sanders supporters have something right? And where they’re wrong, where are they going off the rails?

RBZ: This will be a huge topic of debate for years to come. I think there will be two basic approaches. One is adaptation, and the other is a retreat to autarky.

So on adaptation, the coronavirus has clearly clarified for countries as well as companies the importance of having diversity of sourcing. It doesn’t mean you have to produce everything in your country, but for certain products or services you don’t want to be totally dependent on one other country—particularly one with which you may have an adversarial relationship. In our case, we have a very appealing alternative. Mexico could be a producer for a lot of the goods that China sells us. We could strengthen our own North American continental base if we treated Mexico as a potential place for investment and growth.

But in addition, whether it’s a company or country, you need flexible and resilient supply chains. Certain products are easier to replace, there are different suppliers, it may entail different costs. You’ll hear debates about inventory management, and whether it’s important to have stockpiles of various goods. You’re already seeing that adaptation. For example, some U.S. producers shifted operations from China to Vietnam. Vietnam is also an authoritarian communist system, so you’re getting diversity, but you’re not necessarily promoting our value system over another.

The autarky alternative, which you now hear in some quarters of the Trump Administration, says that the pandemic shows we need to produce everything at home. Therefore, we need to have barriers and we need to close off people and production. We tried this autarky in the 1930s. It didn’t work very well, for us or the world. The United States actually had a global trade surplus in the 1930s; we also had 25 percent unemployment. It’s very costly because you’re devoting your resources and companies to less productive efforts.

Autarky also opens the door, for people concerned about “the swamp,” to special interests, because every interest group will come up with a justification as to why it needs special protection. It will mean higher input costs. People often forget that about 40 to 50 percent of Americans imports are for intermediate goods or commodities. So if you increase the price of the supplies, you’re going to increase the cost for people and lessen their competitiveness.

And as we discovered in the 1930s, autarky is also very bad for the U.S. export industries. So for years, when I was in the U.S. government, I would fight countries that argued they needed to block agricultural imports for food security. They said they didn’t want to import American farm goods because they needed to produce all the food themselves. Americans would argue that we would provide the food, we would have open agricultural markets. In 2008 at the time of the financial crisis, there was also a world food price crisis. At the World Bank, I worked with the WTO and UN agencies to reduce export barriers, to make sure that food could go to those in need. If you’re in American export industries, including all the farmers and ranchers in America, the idea of autarky will not be so good for you.

And then there’s a more fundamental question. Can we reasonably cut ourselves off from pandemics, from environmental conditions, from financial markets, from the integration of the real economy, from proliferation and cyber issues? I don’t think we can. I think you’ll see that companies will want to make adjustments to give them—and investors, frankly, too—more diversified positions. But the idea that we could cut ourselves off from the world is a fool’s errand.

Traditionally in crises, since World War II, the United States has acted as a leader in trying to focus the world’s attention on what to do. That doesn’t mean we were always right, or that countries always liked our priorities and methods, but countries did get used to the idea that the United States would step forward, whether it was in the 2008 financial crisis or whether it was in Gulf Wars and dealing with terrorism, to focus attention on core issues.

The United States is no longer playing that role. There’s a recognition that U.S. leadership—other countries may call it something else—has been a key component of the international system. So we’re seeing what happens in an international, integrated order, even with its frictions, when the United States fails to play that role. So, globalization with Chinese characteristics versus U.S. autarky: How is that going to compete?

TAI: How do you speak to national conservatives who say, “But you know, Robert Zoellick, it turns out that Americans are not only consumers but they’re citizens, and in all these economic debates we have neglected issues of sovereignty, identity, and national belonging.” And maybe there are instances, national conservatives will argue, where we want to give up efficiency or economic outcomes for other things. How do you respond?

RBZ: It’s an understandable argument. One needs to urge people to make sure they understand what they’re giving up, for what they believe will be an additional degree of control, and the question is whether they will actually have that control.

From the very founding of the United States, when it was less than 3 million people, the founders believed that their new nationalism was also a way of reshaping the international order. So I adamantly disagree with people who try to pit nationalism versus internationalism, and I have the Founding Fathers on my side. They were challenging the mercantile, imperialistic, monarchical order. They also believed that they were creating something new: a Republic. In very practical terms, this showed up in how they designed early trade agreements. They knew that they were part of an Atlantic society, and what happened in Europe mattered to them, but they were going to make their own country stronger. They had, over time, a notion of a continental destiny. Thomas Paine referred to beginning the world anew.

Ever since then, the United States has had the idea that its nationalism and its internationalism are two sides of the same coin. That internationalism is partly self-interest, but it’s partly trying to shape the world in the direction that Americans believed was best for America and the world. That’s a viewpoint that has been lost in this Administration, but I discuss it in my book.

When you read how people spoke about the union in the early 19th century, it was almost a mystical concept. They believed that they had created something extraordinary. And when they preserved the union in the Civil War, which took a huge national effort and slaughter, they looked upon that as a possible model for others internationally, in the words of Seward, among others. They saw this as an interstate compact that created cooperation. These concepts about internationalism change over time. Woodrow Wilson tried to change American neutrality into collective security. Others used international law or arms control; it was balance of power and mediation under Teddy Roosevelt. They used different methods, but it doesn’t take much depth of looking at American history to see that the United States always saw its nationalism was integrated with its role in the world, its internationalism.

More specifically, I’ve long believed that you have to help people adapt to change. So if globalization requires rapidity of change, whether it’s technology or trade or immigration, you have to help people adjust. This is a longstanding part of the conservative debate, whether you do this by empowering people or by relying more on governmental institutions. Over time, a conservative communitarian notion has been added to the individualistic ethos that came out of the Reagan revolution.

I don’t think the Administration has been leading the international response to this pandemic, but that doesn’t mean that the United States isn’t playing a leadership role. The Federal Reserve’s dollar swap lines are absolutely critical in keeping the international financial system going. Adam Tooze’s book Crashed recognized this point about 2008. The U.S. military and our intelligence agencies have been oriented towards an alliance system and cooperation.

Some discussions ignore the private sector. Just to give you an example, I was on a call recently with a number of European commissioners and one of them mentioned the discussions they were having with American technology companies about making sure that the information lines stay open, with secure networks and safe information. This commissioner sang the praises of U.S. technology companies. Or I was reading about work that the Gates Foundation has been doing, and you’ll see that some of the much derided pharmaceutical companies have the potential to become heroes in getting us out of the pandemic, whether it’s testing systems, through treatments, or with vaccines.

Part of the genius of America—and its ability to influence the world—is not what comes out of the White House, it’s what comes out of the private sector and our institutions. Humanitarian aid and support for people around the world are also a part of America’s role in the world.

Leaders have to take care of people at home. They have to help them adjust, they have to help them adapt. I also believe that there’s an important role for a civic culture, essentially a national identity. This should be part of national conservatism, a sense of our own beliefs and stories and history.

Part of that history is that we get things wrong, but then we learn and correct mistakes. If people define conservatism as trying to shut the door on the world or trying to close off from other communities, other states, other countries, they’re doomed to fail. And that has not been successful for American conservatism over time.

TAI: Henry Kissinger has said that alliances are not made out of charity, they enhance the power of a nation. In the U.S. debate, there’s been a challenge to the role of our traditional alliances. How do you see it? Where is the debate going?

RBZ: The American concept of alliances grew out of the 1947-1949 experience. For our first 150 years, after Washington’s warning about “no permanent alliances” and Jefferson’s about “no entangling alliances,” America, in general, tried to stay clear of alliances. When we entered World War One, we didn’t enter as an ally but as an “associated power.”

One question that I probe in my book is if U.S. alliances weaken, what can we learn from other ideas about America’s international relations? I talked about one of these, the experience of the union, along with others like trade, technology, and international law. When Kissinger discusses alliances, one has to be careful to look at the context. Sometimes he refers to alliances as ententes, which means countries cooperate because of overlapping interests but not necessarily a shared value system. That approach characterized the European alliance structure in much of the 19th and early 20thcentury.

The American design of alliances in the 20th century was fundamentally different, because it combined security and self-interest with a structure to encourage democratic values and an open, cooperative system. Not all our alliance partners were democracies, but a lot of them became democracies. We also combined alliances with an economic network. I don’t think you can understand the American alliance system without looking at the trading, investment, and international economic order that was created alongside it—for example, the GATT and eventually the WTO and the international exchange rate system. The Marshall Plan preceded NATO.

Over 70 years these alliances and economic networks enabled the United States to leverage its national and continental power. It wasn’t easy to lead this system. Alliance management is a particular skill. Bush 41 was a master at the end of the Cold War. Dealing with other sovereign states with different perspectives requires listening to others, respecting others, compromising with others. But that can be a good thing.

Kissinger has said that Europe has lost its strategic sense, and risks becoming a strategic appendage of Eurasia. He argues, and I agree with him, that while it can be frustrating to deal with European allies, when we do it effectively, we’re better for it. The allies will bring perspective, they will have ideas, they’ll have different resources. Sometimes your partners can get things done that you can’t. And I certainly discovered that in my career, whether in multilateral institutions like the World Bank or with the U.S. government.

My career also focused on building a strong North American base. I tear my hair out in frustration to see our treatment of Mexico. Not only for our own security, but for our influence globally. If we could act with 500 million people in three democracies—cooperating on energy and demonstrating self-sufficiency, even in exports, with better demographics and integrated economic strength—we would be far better off. And I have Ronald Reagan on my side. In his speech in 1979 launching his campaign, Reagan said, it’s time we stop thinking about Mexico and Canada as foreigners; it’s time we realize that they need to be stronger with us. That was a view not only about discrete problems like immigration or the environment or security in the Arctic, but also a question of adding to our leverage globally.

I think the U.S. government could revive the alliance structure. And let me explain why. First, the U.S. military and intelligence capabilities and their professional cultures are aligned with alliances. Consider how the French military waging war in the Sahel wants to have U.S. intelligence and logistics. Look at the Eastern Europeans. Based on 70 years of experience, the senior U.S. military are trained in this alliance system. They’re trained not only in joint commands but in combined commands. They think in terms of alliances, and that is an incredible asset to have.

Second, consider the geopolitical realities. Does South Korea or Japan, given the uncertainties in East Asia, want to cut loose from the United States? Europeans certainly face serious security risks to their east and to their south. Third, European capabilities don’t match the threat. They are recognizing that they may not be able to rely on the United States as in the past, which prompts certain rhetoric from President Macron, among others. However, Europeans are still far away from developing their own capabilities. All these factors may actually make it easier to revive an effective alliance structure after Trump. Repairing international economic networks could prove harder.

Experience has shown Americans that serious breakdowns around the world eventually end up on our agenda. So we need to try to anticipate more. During my time with Bush 41 and James Baker, I found that when we proposed actions, if you’d listen closely to your partners, you could incorporate a number of their ideas and bring people along. This process can help the U.S. to meet the political need for others to share responsibilities more effectively. This isn’t new. The Nixon Doctrine during the Cold War made this point. We will look for others to contribute to the health and vitality of the alliance system.

The United States should not be taken for granted. One of the ironies is that the Trump Administration’s relationship with Saudi Arabia has been too one-way. The oil policies, the situation in Yemen, the treatment of the Qataris, the chopping up of your critics—even for an authoritarian system, that goes too far. The United States should have a serious conversation with the Saudis privately to explain that their behavior’s going to have to change or our support will change. Given the world energy situation, factors that drove the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia many years ago have evolved.

The skill of alliance management, going back to George Marshall and Acheson, is a critical part of America’s leadership. I don’t know whether President Trump and his team will ever recognize this, but at some point their successors will be faced with the issue. They will have to adjust to the world as it is. And there’s now built-in distrust about U.S. reliability.

TAI: It’s our view that among the many challenges we face today is the need to have stable, healthy political parties—center-right and center-left—which across the West seem to be in trouble. There’s been a flourishing of fringes, with extreme positions elbowing their way into the center, and the broad, healthy center is weakening. How do you see that proposition?

RBZ: First, I would observe that your concern about political parties extends to other institutions in America. So if you consider how America will deal with the pandemic, or our future international role, we will rely on the institutions we’ve developed, whether governmental or non-governmental. The Administration has disparaged some of those institutions: the U.S. military, intelligence agencies, and media come to mind. Whatever you want to call it—social capital, or mediating institutions—it’s a distinguishing factor of American society. This is ultimately a key part of America’s resilience.

Political parties have eroded over decades for various reasons. Some reasons pertain to funding. Social media enabled politicians to move outside party structures. Trump used this effectively. Political parties will have to adapt, so as to develop cohesion, and not just at the national level. The Democratic Party has recognized that the Republican Party’s efforts with state legislatures over the course of a decade gave the Republicans influence that the Democrats are now trying to reclaim.

President Bush 43 once related a shrewd assessment of political parties: “When they fail and lose badly, they have to figure out how to adjust.” That’s natural for both Democrats and Republicans. The Republicans lost about 40 House seats. The Trump phenomenon has served Trump; we’ll see if it carries him through this election. One has to ask, when you look at demographic groups by age, ethnic composition, gender, or geography, whether Trump’s formula will win for Republicans in years to come.

A Republican congressman, who was a suburban representative who lost his seat, reminded me: “Politicians are imitative animals. They’ll look at what works.” We will see whether politicians imitate Trump’s style, which is divisive and confrontational, or whether others will succeed with alternative, more cooperative styles.

In the Democratic primaries, African-Americans, starting in South Carolina with Representative Clyburn, revived former Vice President Biden’s campaign. They resisted Sanders, the more extreme candidate. We’ll see if there is an electoral appeal for people who try to pull the country together. Even in dealing with the pandemic crisis, despite clashes, Congress stepped up pretty quickly with big steps. I think there’s more resiliency in the American system than people fear.

Also, populism is anti-expert. Well, we’re seeing now that it’s useful to have infectious disease experts. I noticed that as FEMA brought in an admiral who had logistics experience. Expertise will help the private sector adjust. Maybe people will recall that expertise is valuable.

As someone who has worked a lot with Congress, I often noticed that the members who got a lot of media attention were not necessarily the great legislators. The legislators knew how to put together deals. They knew how to work with their colleagues, how to keep lines of communication open. I hope that there’ll be an appreciation of this, whether at the national level or at the state level with governors.

These comments return to where you began—with history. I’ve been skeptical of the claims that we live in the most acrimonious age. I point to the lead-up to the Civil War, or the early period with Adams and Jefferson and Hamilton, or 1968—those were terrible times of division and acrimony. However, I do think that the political system has rewarded people who posture, as opposed to get things done. People need to compromise to make our system work. I believe the federal system is part of America’s strength and adaptive ability, along with a very important private sector. These are all political strengths that give America an edge over countries like China.

Some fall into the trap of thinking that a strongman will make decisions and command action. I don’t think that will be as successful. But I do think it’s important to remind people that compromise is not a sin, that historical experience supports trying to bring the country together, and at the end of the day what matters is results—whether you can get things done and create an environment in which others can get things done, whether state leaders, civic leaders, or the private sector.

I’m most concerned about the fraying of our international economic ties. So for example, the United States began, during the Reagan Administration, to create the World Trade Organization with a dispute settlement body to make impartial decisions. Sovereign countries could impose barriers, but others could retaliate. Reagan, Bush, and Clinton all pushed for this system. The United States has now tried to deconstruct that system by refusing to appoint people to an appellate body. The WTO could not form appellate panels. Well, in recent weeks, the European Union and about 15 other countries, including China, have said, “Well, we’ll just create an alternative system without the United States.” How does that serve our interest?

There are too many places in the world where, whether due to narrow nationalism or autarky or the idea that we can go our own way and ignore everybody else, we are making mistakes and undermining our place in the world. I believe the United States has got the capacity, the capabilities, the resources, and the ingenuity to turn this around. But it will require leadership, and that’s the question Americans will face through their choice of leaders.

TAI: That takes us to our final question: You have a new book out soon. What is the title, what is the publication date, and what is the argument?

RBZ: It’s America In The World: A History of U.S. Diplomacy and Foreign Policy. The publisher is Twelve, an imprint of Hachette, and the release date is August 4th, but you can pre-order it. I’ve been thinking about the idea of the book for decades, ever since reading Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy. I enjoyed Kissinger’s use of history to discuss foreign policy, but I felt he relied heavily on the European experience.

So, I have been thinking for years how to approach the experience of American diplomacy—its ideas and traditions. I use stories and mini-biographies to discuss how individuals dealt with the problems of their era. I begin with Benjamin Franklin in Paris, during our revolution. Each chapter is about a person or a couple of people who deal with the critical foreign policy issues of their era.

To give you another example, there are very few books about the foreign policy of the Civil War. If Lincoln had not been able to stop Britain and France from intervening, we would have had a very different history. I relate the stories of the Open Door, the Louisiana Purchase, Teddy Roosevelt’s mediation of the Russo-Japanese War, and the First Moroccan Crisis. I’ve used stories and color to make it a very readable account. Then I pull the chapters together by identifying traditions of the American experience.

American foreign policy will change because of Trump and because of underlying changes in the world. It could be helpful for Americans to go back and understand some of the ideas and traditions that had influenced America’s interaction with the world over 200-plus years.

My book also stresses America’s pragmatism. Books on foreign policy often offer intellectual frameworks, and they are fun to debate. Experts enjoy analyzing the theoretical structures. But messy facts usually don’t fit the theories. I offer my experience as a practitioner as well as a student of history. And in my experience, most foreign policy is driven by people trying to solve the problems of their time. They may try to think ahead and their solutions may involve bigger ideas. But at heart, they try to deal with problems pragmatically.

I also offer some insights about how diplomacy is really conducted. I believe there’s more chance and contingency than is conveyed in much historical writing. I’ve tried to write a book that will be entertaining for people who like history and biography, but also will give them ideas about American foreign policy, past, present, and future.

The post Robert B. Zoellick: “We Tried Autarky in the 1930s. It Didn’t Work Very Well” appeared first on The American Interest.

The Forgotten Women of the Gulag

Dressed for a Dance in the Snow: Women’s Voices from the Gulag

Monika Zgustova

Other Press, 2020, 320 pp., $25.99

In November 1962, nine years after Stalin’s death, the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s first novel sent shock waves through the Soviet Union. Here, finally, was a candid takedown of Stalinist tyranny—one that was not samizdat but, remarkably, state-sanctioned thanks to the limited easing of restrictions afforded by Khrushchev’s thaw. A fictional account of the trials and horrors of the Siberian forced labor camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich drew on the author’s experience of the Gulag, first among common criminals in general camps and later among long-term prisoners in so-called “special” camps.

Readers at home and around the world were stunned by the book’s depictions of the merciless Gulag system and its rigorous, systematic efforts to grind down an innocent man. Ivan Denisovich Shukhov does work that is both arduous and monotonous, and is only excused from it when temperatures plummet to –41° C. Apart from sleep, the only time he “lives for himself” is ten minutes in the morning at breakfast, five over dinner, and five at supper. Not that he and his fellow zeks are able to keep track of time: No clocks tick in the camps and convicts are not allowed to carry watches. Food is scant, barely edible, and hardly nourishing. Team leaders determine a person’s fate: “a good one will give you a second life, a bad one will put you in your coffin.” Resistance is futile. Complaining proves fatal. “Better to growl and submit,” Shukhov tells us. “If you were stubborn they broke you.”

Solzhenitsyn paved the way for more former prisoners to open up and recount their stories. To date, however, the majority of those stories have come from male prisoners; the women who were deported to the camps have largely been overlooked. Czech-born author and translator Monika Zgustova has taken a vital step to rectify that gap. Dressed for a Dance in the Snow: Women’s Voices from the Gulag comprises nine valuable eyewitness testimonies from nine women. All endured monstrous suffering. All lived to tell their tale. The book—both a necessary corrective and a compelling read—was originally published in Spanish in 2017. Now, thanks to Julie Jones’ expert translation, it appears in English.

The book’s origins date back to September 2008, when Zgustova traveled to Moscow and was invited to a meeting of Gulag survivors. She harbored a preconception that they would all resemble “lifeless shadows.” Although many were old and poor, most turned out to be sprightly. Zgustova was also surprised to see so many women in attendance. Aware that their stories were less well documented than those of male ex-prisoners, she decided there and then to collect them. So began a long yet rewarding fact-finding mission which took her around the Russian capital and then further afield. “Talking to ‘my’ women,” she notes in her introduction, “I realized that human beings are capable of great fortitude.”

Her first interviewee bears this out. Zayara was the daughter of parents who were lost in the great purges: Her father, a writer, was declared an enemy of the people and shot; a few years later, her mother was decreed an “anti-Soviet agitator” and condemned to ten years in the labor camps. One night in 1949, history repeated itself. At the end of a party Zayara threw to celebrate passing her exams, she answered the door to five uninvited guests: armed policemen with a warrant for her arrest. Unable to locate warm garments, she made do with her party clothes—a straight black skirt, elegant red blouse and high heels. “I left home dressed as if I were going to a dance,” she reveals.

After a spell in the dreaded Lubyanka penitentiary, Zayara was found guilty by association. She was taken by train, then cargo ship, to a work camp in a Siberian village. Other deportees, each a repeat offender, relay the kinds of punishments meted out. In one camp, those who didn’t adhere to the rules were stripped, tied to a tree, and left all night in the taiga to be eaten alive by clouds of flies and mosquitoes; in another, guilty parties were left naked in the snow “and with the temperature at fifty below, they hosed them down. Nobody survived.” Bracing herself, Zayara did as she was instructed and spent her first day digging until her hands bled. At the end of the day, she learned the hard way that she hadn’t filled half her quota. “The way you’re going,” said a supervisor, “you won’t earn enough to eat.”

Susanna, another Muscovite, was deported for standing up and rebelling against Stalin’s misrule. She explains how in 1950 she and two friends grew disenchanted, both with the government’s persecution of Jews and the intelligentsia and their school’s dogged attempts to rewrite history in Russia’s favor. They reacted by forming a secret dissident organization. But it didn’t stay secret for long, and following a swift round-up and clampdown Susanna received one of the severest sentences: 25 years in forced labor camps. Over that period she was shuttled around the Gulag archipelago, spending prolonged stretches in 11 prisons and seven work or penitentiary camps.

She maintained her sanity in one camp by becoming part of a literary circle. At the end of a back-breaking shift she met likeminded inmates in their “improvised book club” to read their own poems or the poetry and prose of their great writers, with an emphasis on those blacklisted by the state. She also preserved her peace of mind—and safeguarded her pride—by taking care of her appearance. “At night,” she remembers, “after 12- and even 15-hour work days, many women addressed their hair and helped each other comb out the lice; they used their hands to ‘iron’ their pants, the only pair they had for work and for sleep; and they cleaned the mud off boots that would be covered with mud again the next day (the mud was part of summer; in the winter there was nothing but ice and snowbanks as tall as two people).”

Ella, a more militant dissident, was also given 25 years of forced labor, in her case far beyond the Arctic Circle. Her testimony underscores the plight of the political prisoner. A member of her terrorist group turned informer and denounced her, but instead of immunity he received the same lengthy sentence. Thieves and murderers—“the political prisoners’ worst enemies”—lived by their own code in the camps, and when they robbed or killed, the authorities looked the other way.

In some camps, women tried, often in vain, to defend their honor. Galya, Zgustova’s youngest interviewee, was not arrested and sent to a camp but rather born and raised in one. Elsewhere we hear of botched abortions in filthy conditions and babies being separated from their mothers. To escape the predatory advances of her superior, Elena took the drastic measure of asking for a transfer, swapping her relatively comfortable job in a camp clinic for the daily danger and hardship of the mines. Valentina paints a grim day-in-the-life picture of a camp filled mainly with female prisoners: women, many of them pregnant, sinking thigh-deep in snow while trying to cut wood, and rewarded with 200 grams of bread and not soup but reheated water. “It was a world of pain and suffering,” she says, “and yet all around us was the overwhelming beauty of the forest!”

A number of Zgustova’s women talk like this, comparing and contrasting the good and the bad. Amazingly, most are glad to have been dealt the rough and the smooth. Susanna describes her struggle of trying to adjust to normal life after her return. She allowed herself to lose touch with old friends and gradually sought the company of women who had also been detainees. She attempted to resume her studies, but despite passing the entrance exams to the University of Moscow she was turned down by the dean, who told her they do not educate “prison fodder.” And yet for her, those agonizing years were formative ones, crucial for building her character but also strengthening it. “I can’t imagine my life without the camps,” she confesses. “More than that: If I had to live my life over, I would not want to avoid that experience.” Ella is of a similar opinion, going as far as to say she is “grateful” to the fate that sent her to the Gulag: “I cannot imagine my life without this experience that made me strong and taught me what really matters.” Zayara even claims that her imprisonment in Siberia was “inspiring.”

Only Elena offers a voice of dissent. “The Gulag,” she insists, “was a waste of time, of health, of energy. Human beings are made to search for happiness and beauty, to do something that is fulfilling.” Indeed, it is hard to find any sense of fulfillment in the accounts of appalling abuse, which make for sobering reading. Natalia is shut up in a psychiatric prison and given psychotropic drugs, which in the long term induce Parkinson’s disease and bring on memory loss. Valentina is sent to solitary confinement, where she becomes a dokhodiaga, a half-dead nag, Gulag argot for prisoners at death’s door. Elena and other luckless prisoners undergo Sisyphean toil when they are ordered one day to build a wall with stones they can barely lift, and then, the next day, to tear it down. “The worst torture of all,” she explains, “was the futility of a superhuman effort.” Every woman describes being plagued by ever-present, all-pervading cold, hunger, exhaustion, fear, and despair.

With this in mind, Zgustova’s book should, by rights, be something of an ordeal: if not off-putting then tough going. But it is no mere catalogue of cruelty. Each story is one of suffering but also survival. It is heartwarming to learn that the women found solace in culture. They discuss the forbidden books they read and the poetry they wrote and recited after hours. “We preferred to sleep less and to try to develop our minds through literature,” says Zayara. Irina, the daughter of Boris Pasternak’s last flame and the inspiration for the character of Lara in Doctor Zhivago, tells how she fell in love with a prisoner and communicated with him by hiding poems in the bricks of the wall that divided the women’s camp from the men’s. Galya, that child of the Gulag, reveals that female prisoners made books for her by stitching together scraps of paper.

The other coping mechanism for these exiled women was friendship. Despite the authorities’ best efforts to split up inmates and send them off to different camps just as they were getting to know each other, many deep and lasting friendships were forged. Brutality engendered the tightest of bonds. “I had real friends there,” says Zayara. “Since then, I haven’t confided in anyone.”

The women’s positive outlooks, extraordinary resilience, and random acts of kindness also help offset the gloom. Additional color and light relief comes from the assortment of tenacious and compassionate secondary characters, from Zayara’s guardian angel Nikolai, a camp veteran who opted to take a violin to Siberia instead of a winter coat, to Sergei Prokofiev’s wife Lina, who peeled potatoes from six in the morning until nightfall yet still found time to look out for Susanna.

On occasion, Zgustova sells her reader short. Elena shows her a huge archive of books, letters, documents, photographs, and drawings, and promises to tell her everything she wants to know. “I’m a compendium, an encyclopedia of the Gulag,” she gushes. However, what should have been one of the longest chapters in the book turns out to be one of the shortest.

And yet for the most part, Zgustova delivers, and triumphantly. Dressed for a Dance in the Snow helps illuminate further one of the darkest chapters of Soviet history. To this end, it can sit comfortably alongside the work of Svetlana Alexievich. Like the Nobel laureate’s oral histories, Zgustova’s interviews demonstrate how ordinary people responded to overwhelming pressure. Her women lived through a frozen hell but clung to hope and refused to be broken. Their voices, previously subdued or silent, now speak out and demand to be heard.

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The Virtues of a Confrontational China Strategy

Views of President Donald Trump among Japan’s policy elites are complex. Ask a foreign policy expert about the current occupant of the White House, and most would probably find many things to criticize. But if you ask them if they miss the Obama presidency, most of the same people would also respond negatively—perhaps more so.

Japanese policymakers despaired of Obama’s so-called “21st-century approach” when contrasted against China’s 19th-century habit of using raw power to intimidate all countries in the region to build up its own sphere of influence. While President Obama was talking about possible cooperation with China on global issues in a bid to make a responsible stakeholder out of a rival, Beijing was busy sending military ships to the Senkakus, muscling the Philippines out of Scarborough Shoal, and creating artificial islands in the South China Sea. Since the end of the Cold War, Japan had continuously warned the United States about China. For all of President Trump’s various shortcomings, it looks like Japan finally has someone in the White House who properly recognizes and appreciates the challenge.

Although Japan never openly opposed the United States’ optimistic engagement policy towards China (which first flowered during the Clinton Administration), Japanese Sinologists had little confidence that China would ever become a liberal democracy. Most of Japan’s China experts argued, based on 2,000 years of experience, that China would never change its culture or nature: China was and always will be China. From the time of Confucius in the fifth century B.C., for the Chinese the world has had only one heaven and one ruler—the Emperor of China. All non-Chinese “barbarians” have to acknowledge Chinese preeminence.

Japan has never subscribed to this view. Japan’s historic approach toward the Indo-Pacific was to maintain its own sovereignty while preserving economic, cultural as well as political interactions with its neighbors. In the face of China’s recent rise, Japan is still determined to sustain its sovereignty and prosperity. The present international order and regional balance of power, with the U.S.-Japan Alliance as its central pillar, has made that possible. Japan wants to sustain this status quo.

For its part, China has consistently challenged this status quo since at least 1992 when it adopted its Territorial Legislation, unilaterally declaring the inclusion of Senkaku and South China Sea islands as “the land territory of the People’s Republic of China.” After attempts at accommodation under the Clinton Administration, President Bush entered office prepared to take the China challenge seriously. His administration’s first Quadrennial Defense Review, published in September 2001, referred to the China challenge for the first time, stating that “[t]he possibility exists that a military competitor with a formidable resource base will emerge in the [Asia) region.” Japan and the United States were planning to discuss China during their annual meeting between foreign and defense ministers during the UN General Assembly in New York that September when 9/11 happened. China quickly agreed to support the U.S. global anti-terrorism effort, buying Beijing at least a decade to continue its modernization effort while Washington was focused elsewhere. The Chinese started investing heavily in renewing their aging military and in developing modern power-projection capabilities, including building up a large blue water navy—a first for China in modern times. And China has not been shy in leveraging its new capabilities. Outposts across the South China Sea were gradually built up and occupied one by one, and from 2008 on, Beijing began sending patrol vessels into Japan’s territorial waters around the Senkakus.

President Obama was nevertheless not moved to take a harder line when he came to power. The Obama Administration was executing exactly what liberal intellectuals in its orbit were advocating: focusing on cooperation on global issues coupled with deference to China’s so-called core interests (including Taiwan and human rights catastrophes in Tibet and Xinjiang)—all in the hope of shaping China into a more liberal actor that would share the U.S. burden of underwriting the existing international order. Until its last day, the Obama Administration believed China was “shapeable.”

Throughout this period, policy consensus was not monolithic. A minority of Washington’s Sinologists warned against the efficacy of engagement. James Mann’s 2007 book The China Fantasy: Why Capitalism Will Not Bring Democracy to China, for example, argued that the central problem with the concept of “engagement” was in effect the question: “Who is engaging whom?” Are we really engaging China, or is China engaging the international system to its own benefit? And who is changing whom—are we changing China, or is the international system changing to accommodate Chinese behavior? And to its credit, the United States did do a fair bit of “hedging” on its bet that China would come around. The Obama Administration strengthened the U.S.-Japan alliance, enhanced military cooperation with Australia and the Philippines, and embraced India and Vietnam as close partners. All of these efforts were more than welcomed in Tokyo and other Asian capitals.

However, the priority mission was always to engage China. Obama’s trip to China in 2016 is a case in point. That July, Beijing had refused to accept the verdict of the International Tribunal in Hague which overwhelmingly supported Manila’s claims in the South China Sea, calling the ruling “just a piece of paper.” A month later, in August, China had sent some 200 to 300 fishing vessels to the Senkakus. Right after these events, President Obama visited Hangzhou, and issued a Fact Sheet reflecting U.S. priorities with Beijing: among them Peacekeeping, Refugees, Maritime Risk Reduction and Cooperation, Iraq, Space Cooperation, Afghanistan, Nuclear Security and Liability, Combating Wildlife Trafficking, Oceans Cooperation, Strengthening Development Cooperation, Africa, and Global Health. There was no mention of censuring China’s coercive and destabilizing behavior.

This was the regional strategic backdrop to President Trump’s election. Japan was, of course, as surprised as anyone by the results. Tokyo, however, was quick to act. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe quickly flew to New York to meet President-elect Trump in his offices in Trump Tower. This was a risky and unprecedented move, but the gambit paid off for Japan, enabling Abe to take Trump’s measure on international issues, build a relationship with his future counterpart, and deliver a clear message about the importance of the region and the challenge posed by China. In February 2017, when Abe met Trump after his inauguration, they agreed to a joint declaration that was unprecedented in its scope and ambition. The impact was twofold.

First, it sent a strong warning signal to China. The two leaders confirmed all the fundamental principles which we in Tokyo considered to form the foundation for peace and stability in the region: The United States’ renewed commitment to the Indo-Pacific, to nuclear deterrence against territorial aggression, as well as a recommitment to the pursuit of denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. “The United States will strengthen its presence in the region, and Japan will assume larger roles and responsibilities in the alliance,” the communiqué read, and further instructed foreign and defense ministers to “review the respective roles, missions, and capabilities of the two countries.” The outlines of the big picture were agreed to by Trump himself, and all other “details” would be handled by senior ministers. This first declaration reassured not only Japan but also allies and partners across the region.

Second, it altered the decision-making on the conduct of the bilateral alliance. The declaration was drafted jointly, with the Japanese side contributing equally—if not more—to its content. Maximum pressure toward North Korea, a Free and Open Indo-Pacific, the importance of Southeast Asia—all of these concepts were, to a certain extent, suggestions from the Japanese-side. For some Americans, it may be easy to overlook the significance of this transition for Japan. Since the end of World War II, Japan’s foreign policy has been more or less responsive to, and heavily shaped by, U.S. preferences and influence. Japanese bureaucrats and policymakers had become accustomed to depending on international pressure to inform Japanese decision-making—so much so that there is even a term for it in Japanese: “Gai-atsu.” Psychologically, this was a critical breakthrough. So, for the first time, Japanese officials were jointly formulating strategic directions and approaches to geopolitical challenges in the Indo-Pacific with our American counterparts, rather than soliciting their views and providing our critique as we had historically done.

Since then, Trump has called Abe at every important occasion—before and after his meeting with Xi Jinping, for example, and as he planned his opening toward North Korea. According to media reports, as of May 2019, Abe and Trump had met 10 times, talked over the phone 30 times, and played golf 4 times. This volume of engagement, as measured in telephone calls, was already quadruple the number of engagements that Abe had with Obama. This is by far the most intimate relationship that Trump has established among foreign leaders.

The Trump Administration’s implementation of its confrontational policy with China, however, has caused considerable confusion, especially among the broader public. As former Vice President Joseph Biden argued in his recent Foreign Affairs essay, “the most effective way to meet that challenge [China] is to build a united front of U.S. allies and partners to confront China’s abusive behaviors.” When President Trump used economic leverage not only against China but also against its allies and partners, it raised doubts in many minds across the region as to the credibility of American security guarantees and commitments. Japan is no exception. A recent Nikkei poll conducted in January 2020 revealed that 72 percent of Japanese don’t want President Trump to be re-elected, precisely because of this uncertainty.

So, do we want, if possible, to go back to the world before Trump? For many decision-makers in Tokyo, the answer is probably no, because having a poorly implemented but fundamentally correct strategy is better than having a well-implemented but ambiguous strategy. We just don’t want to see the United States go back again to engagement, which will undoubtedly come at our, and other Asian countries’ expense.

We certainly do not consider the U.S.-Japan alliance to be transactional in nature. That said, we would prefer an alliance that both better serves our national interests while also serving broader U.S. interests. In plainer language, an alliance explicitly focused on China is better than one which is vague and unfocused, or worse yet, afraid to confront the greatest challenge. How to share that burden is a matter of alliance management. In other words, it is a process matter. It is important to re-affirm that an alliance is a means, not an end, to serve our shared national interests.

Western Europeans, in particular, may be puzzled by this kind of calculus, but that is merely the result of Europe’s own economically transactional approach when it comes to China, which has prioritized business ties and had leaders look the other way as China has thrown its weight around in its neighborhood. For countries on the receiving end of Chinese coercion, a tougher U.S. line on China is more important than any other aspect of U.S. policy. Asian elites—in Taipei, Manila, Hanoi, New-Delhi—increasingly calculate that Trump’s unpredictable and transactional approach is a lesser evil compared to the danger of the United States going back to cajoling China to be a “responsible stakeholder.” A prominent pundit went so far as to assert that “Asian elites have grown oddly sanguine about a Trump second term.”

The truth is that, facing continuous pressure from Beijing, Asian countries are desperately seeking continued U.S. commitment and presence in the region, and the U.S.-Japan alliance is a key component of that. While quietly resenting President Trump boasting about how much he manages to squeeze from allies, most countries would be ready to consider a revised form of burden-sharing provided that U.S. commitments remain firm. There is a real opening here to set a healthy new dynamic for the region that could guarantee stability for several generations.

Of course, a more sophisticated implementation of a strategy for balancing China—one that leverages the strengths and support of like-minded allies like Japan—would be most welcome. Whoever resides in the White House in January 2021, Tokyo’s expectation is to continue our bilateral strategic discussion on equal terms, focusing our shared efforts on wisely implementing the current strategy objective of maintaining U.S. primacy and presence in the Indo-Pacific in support of the existing rules-based international system that we have all benefitted so greatly from.

The post The Virtues of a Confrontational China Strategy appeared first on The American Interest.

Countering China’s Grand Narratives

COVID-19 has not suspended tensions between America and China but exacerbated them. That much, at least, is clear from the recent spat arising from the Donald Trump administration’s use of the term “China virus” or “Wuhan coronavirus,” which was denounced as “racist” and “xenophobic” by Chinese officials. In returning fire, Beijing branded the American response to the pandemic as “sloppy” and “inadequate” and lauded its own draconian measures in locking down much of the country as evidence of the superiority of its authoritarian system.

That boast is better understood as an attempt to deflect attention away from the fact that failures in accountability and governance allowed COVID-19 to spread throughout China and the rest of the world in the first place. Moreover, it is arguable that governments in South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong responded more effectively than China without the draconian measures adopted by Beijing.

Still, the point is that propaganda is an important, perhaps even decisive, weapon in shaping the environment to one’s liking. And it is China, not America, that has been winning the battle of narratives in the region.

Nowhere is this more apparent, and important, than Southeast Asia, the geographical heart of the Indo-Pacific and primary strategic battleground between America and China.

As a response to rising Chinese power and revisionist behavior, America has put forward the concept of a Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP). This concept reaffirms the security and economic rules-based order that has existed since after World War II—especially as it relates to freedom of the regional and global commons such as sea, air, and cyberspace, respect for state sovereignty, respect for international law, and the promotion of free and open trade and investment environments.

There was once confidence the FOIP would gain strong buy-in from maritime states within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)—the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. China has constructed seven artificial islands in the South China Sea and steadily developed these military assets in a highly contested maritime area. Beijing continues to construct military buildings, port facilities, radar and sensor installations, hardened shelters for missiles brought to these artificial islands, airstrips, and aircraft hangers, as well as significant storage facilities for fuel, water, and ammunition.

To entrench its de facto control over contested areas, Beijing has blocked other states from exploiting natural resources within their own exclusive economic zones, including by threatening economic punishment and actively deploying maritime law enforcement and militia to the area. All this is occurring despite previous promises not to militarize the artificial features and the handing down of a binding arbitration award in 2016 by the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA), which largely invalidates the claims China has made to most parts of the South China Sea.

Moreover, the FOIP directly supports the highest and most enduring strategic priority for the small and/or vulnerable maritime Southeast Asian states: to avoid being dominated by another great regional great power. It offers a vision of enhanced and entrenched sovereignty for large and small states alike against external domination and coercion—of relations ordered by rules, not by superior force—in contrast to Beijing’s seemingly Sino-centric and hierarchical vision of order in Asia.

The FOIP should also be attractive to these Southeast Asian states as the basis on which U.S. strategic presence can be entrenched in the region. It should serve as a complementary framework for alliance and defense relationships between the United States and its allies and partners, and should underpin closer defense relationships between Southeast Asian powers, as well as between Southeast Asian states and regional countries such as Australia and Japan. It was thought that these denser security networks would assist in keeping the United States fully engaged in the region and make it more difficult for China to challenge or alter the preferred strategic status quo for the six Southeast Asian states.

And yet, contrary to American expectations, the embrace of the FOIP by Southeast Asian states has been equivocal and underwhelming. The record over the past couple of years has been disappointing for those hoping there would be a more unified and robust response to Chinese strategic and defense activities and policies emanating from Southeast Asia. This is despite increasing concerns with the latter’s policies and behavior, and strong individual support for the American naval presence in the region. Even as China has extended its militarization and hold of artificial islands, Southeast Asian nations have been mostly silent on the importance and legally binding nature of the PCA Award in the face of continued and flagrant Chinese violations. Instead, the ASEAN states have been co-opted by China in taking the focus away from United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) principles and international law and toward concentrating on the completion of a China-ASEAN Code of Conduct (CoC), which is neither binding nor places any significant restraint on Chinese actions.

Whereas there were some criticisms of the Obama Administration when it showed inadequate resolve against China, there are now widespread Southeast Asian apprehensions that the Trump Administration is taking too confrontational an approach to China and becoming too eager to force Southeast Asian nations to “choose” between America and China. This is occurring even though it is Chinese, not American policies that present the greater threat to the preferred status quo of these Southeast Asian nations. While some of the Southeast Asian criticisms of decisions taken by the Trump Administration (such as its withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the President’s failure to attend the East Asia Summit in 2019) are understandable, the deliberately non-confrontational policies adopted by Southeast Asian states prior to the Trump Administration have undoubtedly provided diplomatic cover for China to appear as a constructive player while simultaneously extending its reach and presence in the region.

What explains the failure of small Southeast Asian states to support the FOIP as a counter-dominance approach to China? Purely transactional accounts based on material incentives offer only a partial explanation. An equally important factor is China’s use of grand narratives to manipulate and influence the hedging strategies of these countries. The effect of these narratives is to weaken the appetite of Southeast Asian states for a counter-dominance response with respect to China, causing them to make decisions that are detrimental to the interests of the United States and its allies.

Before Xi Jinping, China was desperate to emphasize its sense of vulnerability and the scale of its domestic challenges in order to counter fears about its accumulation of power. Since around 2014, however, China has moved toward promoting (rather than downplaying) strength and concealing (rather than highlighting) vulnerability.

This is evident in its 2019 Defense White Paper  which is as much an instrument of propaganda as it is a doctrinal or policy document. For example, unlike the previous nine Defense White Papers, the 2019 version is proudly littered with examples of PLA activity even when referring to contested regions such as the South China Sea. While the 2019 Defense White Paper is open about the military and technological gap the PLA must narrow to become a global military leader, the document is nevertheless boastful about the increasing breadth, tempo, and sophistication of PLA activities.

Similarly, Beijing prefers to overstate rather than understate the expansiveness and ambition of flagship economic industrial policies such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Made in China 2025. With respect to the BRI, projects involving Chinese firms in the 65 or more countries along the BRI are often counted as BRI projects even if that project was not conceived with the BRI in mind or preceded the formal announcement of the BRI. While the BRI began as a policy framework to mitigate domestic economic problems (for example, by creating external markets for the excess capacity generated by chronic over-investment), Xi’s May 2017 speech at the First Belt and Road Forum framed the Initiative as emanating from the enduring greatness of Chinese civilization.

More broadly, Xi makes the case for the inevitability of Chinese success and dominance to an external audience, unlike all his predecessors since Deng Xiaoping, who stressed the scale and depth of Chinese vulnerabilities and challenges. One can see this in the way Beijing actively promotes its authoritarian capitalist model as superior to the liberal democratic one of the United States. An important corollary of this narrative is that the United States is a regional interloper whose interest in Asia is strategically “optional”—plus, the United States will always be distracted by other global priorities (such as in the Middle East) or else taken in inconsistent directions by the vagaries and irrationalities of domestic politics. As a result, Washington is undependable and always at risk of “abandoning” individual Southeast Asian states. By contrast, China is permanently in the region, focused first and foremost on Asia, unchanging in its objectives, fundamentally undeterrable, and prepared to pay any cost to achieve its goals.

One can debate whether hubris or artifice drives the confident promotion of these narratives. Either way, their acceptance is essential for Chinese strategic success. For small states, the will to resist even a revisionist great power is greatly diminished if there is consensus that the great power will dominate regardless of whether other states disapprove of its behavior. Striking an unequal accommodation or removing oneself from the fray is preferable to balancing against the future dominant power. Small states figure they can’t fight the future—so why not make the best of it?

If China relied too heavily on coercion, Southeast Asian states might be more likely to embrace the FOIP and countenance more active balancing measures against the prospect of Chinese dominance. But the CCP has been proactive in persuading Southeast Asian states to hedge rather than balance against Beijing, by promoting norms and practices that support its accumulation of power and influence.

Beijing is cognizant that the significant powers in the region will not become Chinese allies in the way that Japan and Australia are allies of America. Indeed, its 2019 Defense WP reaffirms that Beijing will not seek alliances with any country. For that reason, “dominance” based on overwhelming material superiority is probably not possible, not to mention exceedingly costly should it be attempted. Moreover, constant coercion of other states might eventually convince them to balance against Beijing. Threats and coercion cannot be a sound future basis for Chinese power and influence.

It is for these reasons that Beijing is attempting to enhance its “authority” and “legitimacy” as its power grows in relative terms. Whereas coercion relies on threats or actual punishments to shape or change the behavior of others, the notion of authority is based on the “legitimate” exercise of power—that is, the acceptance of unequal power relations in the belief that the inequality is justified. If achieved, such authority is a more efficient and enduring way to exercise power because it induces compliance from smaller powers based on the recognition or acceptance of the “right” of China to impose obligations on them.

That “right” might be understood in moral terms, or based on a long-term material calculation that takes account of the emerging (Sino-centric) structure of the system. Either way, the point is that smaller countries come to accept that there is one set of rules for China, and a different set of rules for themselves. Unlike the FOIP framework, the Chinese approach is inherently and overtly hierarchical. If accepted, it reduces the need for China to rely on mere threats or punishments.

Consider the primary forms of diplomatic messaging China uses for Southeast Asia as opposed to Western liberal democracies. With the latter, China promotes the notion of “mutual benefit” and “win-win,” ideas outwardly respectful of sovereign equality. With Southeast Asia, by contrast, there is increasing emphasis on the permanence and greatness of Chinese civilization as the enduring basis for hierarchical—but stable and benevolent—relationships with smaller states. Importantly, according to the Chinese message, the benevolence and fairness of Chinese rule over centuries is a guarantee that the contemporary CCP overlords will be just and fair. This, rather than support for the abstract notion of a FOIP, is designed to enhance Chinese authority and leadership.

China has attached these narratives to actual policies. For example, the BRI is designed to spur “common development” through the strengthening of infrastructure, markets, and networks. To Southeast Asians, Beijing is not apologetic that the BRI is China-centric or even that Chinese entities are the primary beneficiaries. Countries are often flattered by being told that they form essential nodes for a vast China-centric network. But the overriding message is that benefits can flow to the entire region only if the great Chinese civilizational state is at the center of economic, political, and diplomatic life in the region. As Xi Jinping puts it, “When the big river is full of water, the smaller ones never run dry.”

In selling the material virtues of a hierarchical Chinese-centric order, the main drawcard is the guarantee of benefits to smaller states, in comparison to the uncertain benefits of the FOIP’s liberal rules-based order. Whereas impersonal and ruthless market-based principles create short-term winners and losers based on profitability and economic efficiency, embracing the Chinese system will guarantee the participants benefit, albeit in an uneven, unequal way. Southeast Asian countries are well aware that Chinese investment in their respective states is based more on Chinese “largesse” than the impersonal market forces that drive Japanese, American, and Australian economic activity in Asia. But that is the point: Only by submitting to a Sino-centric world can one secure that largesse for oneself. China is thus making a normative and material case for its unique hierarchical authority, underpinned by the argument that a Sino-centric world is the natural and historic state of affairs.

China also realizes that any smooth and peaceful transition to a China-centric system requires the co-optation of ASEAN. Since China became an ASEAN Dialogue Partner in 1996, it has established almost 50 mechanisms with ASEAN. Common to all these mechanisms is the aim of establishing Chinese normative authority and legitimacy by providing stability and security through economic development. A prominent example is China’s attempts to integrate the BRI with ASEAN’s connectivity agenda. As Singapore’s Bilahari Kausikan warns:

China’s natural gravitational pull is being enhanced by various infrastructure projects. . . . These projects have geopolitical consequences, intended or not. They could in effect merge southwest China and mainland Southeast Asia into one economic space. International boundaries will . . . remain as lines on maps. But they could be relegated to inconveniences or irrelevancies.

When one analyzes China’s steady upgrading of institutional mechanisms with ASEAN—from the ASEAN-China Free Trade Area to a Special ASEAN-China Defense Minister’s Meeting to ASEAN-China Cultural Cooperation—the fundamental approach and message is the promotion of China-centric economic opportunities that underpin political, security, and cultural advancement for all. The same is true of mechanisms at the sub-regional level that are not explicitly ASEAN projects, such as the Pan-Asian (or Kunming to Singapore) railway or Lancang-Mekong Cooperation. For example, the Chinese message at the September 2018 China-ASEAN Expo in Nanning was that “China welcomes ASEAN countries aboard the express train of China’s economic development . . . and will share the dividends of economic growth with ASEAN.” It is all about connecting the material—and therefore political and security—destiny of these nations to China.

These Chinese messages are neither universally accepted nor uncritically received, and Southeast Asian officials frequently complain to America about Chinese actions. At the same time, they publicly demand, and have received, support for “ASEAN centrality” and the organization’s principles of “neutrality” and “inclusiveness.” Individual countries, including claimant states, insist they must never be forced to “choose sides” when it comes to disagreements between Washington and Beijing, even though they take a clear-eyed view of what the latter is really up to in the South China Sea. They remain extremely reluctant to openly support any action by the United States or allies that would enrage Beijing.

In practice, however, “neutrality” is itself a strategic decision, one with long-term consequences for the regional balance of power. And when ASEAN member states focus on the short-term benefits of cooperation, they are effectively sacrificing their long-term economic and strategic sovereignty. Moreover, Chinese policies are being promoted as a kind of “natural evolution,” while U.S. actions are presented as disruptive and costly. Central to conditioning ASEAN states to accept their new “normal” is a narrative of moral restitution in which China is just restoring what Western powers took from it, returning to its “natural” borders. Any attempts to counter that new normal are thus taken to be inherently disruptive and illegitimate.

Beijing hopes that by shaping the interests and perspectives of elites, it can influence its neighbors in a way that serves China’s interests. This influence campaign is far more sophisticated and extensive than America’s, which focuses more on abstract principles than behavioral and psychological manipulation. This has allowed China to exert far more sway over smaller states than should be the case.

In any emerging contest between great powers where the outcome is uncertain, smaller states tend to hedge rather than balance. Southeast Asian states will seek to maximize strategic options in the longer-term (or avoid making any strategic choices now from which it might be difficult to retreat) because of geostrategic uncertainty. This often entails making short-term choices even though many Southeast Asian states (incorrectly or else ingenuously) remain adamant that no such short-term choices are being made. The less strategic nations focus on securing short-term gains without thinking too deeply about long-term costs.

In this context, pressuring Southeast Asian states to explicitly reject the BRI or sign on to longer-term strategic blueprints to counter China will be less effective. The better approach is to work with the hedging mindsets of Southeast Asian states rather than force them to balance. In particular, it is better to shape the short-term decisions by Southeast Asian states in a way that explicitly maximizes their freedom of action in the future and minimizes the prospect of them being inadvertently locked into Beijing’s strategic or economic orbit in the longer-term. The aim should be to assist with “dominance denial” approaches rather than enlist them as balancers against China.

For example, the FOIP should emphasize economic and governance principles of sustainability for developing and middle-income countries, rather than focus too heavily on security and great power (zero-sum) competition. The purpose is to encourage ASEAN states to support minimal standards of transparency, commerciality, and debt sustainability, and push for these principles to be included in ASEAN and bilateral economic frameworks. The overt rationale ought to be that it is in the American interest that the strategic and economic options of ASEAN states are never permanently or structurally bound to any country—America’s or China’s.

It is also more important to deepen practical military-to-military relationships with these countries than to seek high-level agreement on strategic outcomes, which is unlikely to occur. For example, in recent times, U.S. cooperation on counterterrorism and counterinsurgency with the Philippines has caused the Filipino defense establishment to push back against President Rodrigo Duterte’s efforts to deemphasize the American alliance in favor of closer relations with China. In countries such as Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia, the high value placed on the practical mil-to-mil relationship with the United States has acted as a partial “stabilizer” in preventing these countries from leaning too far toward China.

Finally, shaping smaller states’ hedging strategies means respecting their need for information about various American policies. This is evident in the ongoing economic dispute between America and China. Without more information about what sort of deal might be reached, or the ability to provide any input into the terms of the deal, it is difficult for smaller states to calculate what effect any deal would have on them. Furthermore, while the relative size and importance of the U.S. economy would likely limit retaliatory actions by Beijing, Southeast Asian states could feel disproportionate economic pain if they were to take a side—even one on principle and not action.

When it comes to international institutions, smaller states are more concerned about preserving seriously flawed or ineffective institutions than America. For example, even though many Southeast Asian countries recognize the flaws of the World Trade Organization (WTO), they will nevertheless seek to preserve the relevance and integrity of the institution, because of the benefit it offers smaller economies. In contrast, the Trump Administration’s frustrations with the fundamental inability of the WTO to address Chinese economic practices—such as the massive subsidies provided to state-owned enterprises and national champions, its “Made in China 2025” indigenous innovation drive, and intellectual property violations—has led Washington to downgrade the importance of the WTO and attempt a bilateral re-ordering of the economic relationship instead.

The point is that America needs to offer Southeast Asian states an indication of what the intended institutional outcome might be: reform of the WTO, a parallel multilateral economic regime, or something else entirely. Without that information, they will remain neutral or even support a Sino-centric institution over an alternative about which they have minimal information.

Shaping hedging behaviors cannot be separated from grand narratives, since one’s perception of the “shape” of things to come will inform assessments of risk, cost, benefit, and lost opportunity. In a country such as Thailand, where most elites don’t seem to question Chinese narratives, there’s a temptation to develop a “special relationship” with China. The contrast is Vietnam, where there is more profound understanding of the CCP’s strengths and weaknesses, and therefore much more willingness to pursue a dominance denial hedging strategy.

There are four counter-narratives which immediately come to mind and for which ample evidence can be presented.

First, it is widely believed that the more assertive policies of Xi Jinping and the Communist Party begin from a position of unprecedented strength and national resilience—stemming, in part, from an authoritarian politics that contrasts favorably with the chaos and dysfunction of liberal democracies. In fact, the truth is quite the opposite. Xi and the Communist Party are engaged in a high-risk and high-cost approach to pursuing growing Chinese ambitions abroad, whilst concealing internal weaknesses and vulnerabilities. One could point to growing concerns about the rapid accumulation of debt in the domestic financial system, or to the deteriorating capacity of local governments to fund public and social goods.

Second, a common perception is that China does not need America and other advanced economies to achieve its objectives. In fact, China cannot achieve its external objectives without the cooperation of America and other major advanced economies. Despite its economic size, its economic tools and levers in the world are surprisingly limited in important respects. Even the resilience of its domestic economy is enormously vulnerable to U.S. policies. For example, China’s currency is neither free-floating nor freely convertible, which limits the extent to which it can become a “store of value” and therefore a genuine reserve international currency. It also means Beijing effectively outsources the value of its currency to other countries—and to the United States most of all. Moreover, China still relies heavily on importing high-tech components, machinery, know-how, and intellectual property from other countries.

Third, many believe that the United States and its allies have little ability to influence domestic Chinese politics, especially when it comes to challenging Xi’s authority. In fact, Xi’s risk-tolerant approach is causing immense angst. The more failures are attributed to Xi’s actions, the more pressure he will likely feel to retreat and take a more cautious approach. As with virtually all major economic developments in China, the Party soaks up the praise when things go well and will wear the blame when the reverse occurs. Xi himself has been openly accused of mismanaging the relationship with America, and of overreaching in his aggressive promotion of the BRI; his purging of more than 1.5 million officials, including more than 100 top generals and Party members, may come back to haunt him.

Fourth, although the United States fought two global wars in the previous century to prevent the emergence of a Eurasian hegemon, the Chinese narrative that the United States is a distant, unreliable power needs to be addressed. One counter-narrative could be that the geographical distance of America means Washington must negotiate the terms of its forward presence with smaller Southeast Asian states, while a “resident” power like China does not. Because it requires the acquiescence of smaller states to maintain its forward presence, the United States is less likely than China to bully and coerce states. In that sense, it is a much more trustworthy partner for small countries when it comes to dominance denial.

Finally, the United States and others must continue to contest the argument that a Sino-centric economic and strategic order will be benevolent and guarantee material benefits for all participants. A greater willingness to talk about Chinese “debt traps” for vulnerable economies has made countries more cautious about taking on Chinese-funded infrastructure projects. This ought to be placed in the broader context that reciprocal benefits are less likely to flow to countries within an order where China sets and enforces the rules; indeed, Chinese industrial policies have contributed to a more than three-fold increase in ASEAN’s trade deficit with China over the past decade. In addition, China is more a taker of technology than a source of it, unlike the United States and other developed economies.

It is also important to contest Chinese official history about its record of benevolence. Like all great nations and empires, China has expanded and contracted through war and conquering. The “Middle Kingdom” is not a uniquely benevolent or unchanging entity. It is an expansionary power that will ultimately extend its influence through coercion and force if it is able to do so.

In taking the comprehensive challenge of China seriously, America tends to focus too much on the former’s size and strength and not enough on its vulnerabilities, thereby playing into Beijing’s hands. The examples above are not exhaustive, but are offered as useful illustrations of messages that will help refute deliberate Chinese attempts at narrative control. The point is not simply to “bash China,” but to influence the hedging strategies of Southeast Asian states by giving them incentives to pursue dominance denial.

For small states in a region dominated by great powers, ensuring that one is not on the losing side is as important as choosing principles that will protect one’s sovereignty and freedom of action. Convincing them they do not need to prematurely choose China over America is an essential first step.

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Don’t Slash the Defense Budget to Pay for COVID-19

Recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic is going to be a costly affair. On top of the already burgeoning national debt, Congress and the President will be adding trillions to it. It’s a sea of red as far as the eye can see.

With the defense budget being the largest piece of the federal discretionary spending pie, it is certain to be a target for sharp cuts. Republicans will see exploding deficits as an urgent policy matter to fix, while Democrats will be looking for any monies they can carve out to fund their ever-increasing domestic agenda. Both parties will ignore the “mandatory” side of the budget—Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, et al.—even though it now is well over 60 percent of the budget, and growing.

We’ve seen this movie before. In the wake of the Great Recession, the Obama Administration cut nearly $800 billion in planned defense expenditures in its first 3 years, matching essentially the amount it poured into its 2009 “stimulus” package. With the subsequent enactment of the Budget Control Act, from 2011 until the first Trump budget in 2017, the percentage of the federal budget that went to defense dropped from nearly 20 percent to 15 percent and, as a percentage of the GDP, from 4.6 percent to 3.1 percent.

The difficulty with following a similar path is two-fold.

First, the security environment has gotten both worse and more complex. Russia, China, and Iran have become more aggressive and more potent adversaries. Toss in North Korea and the continuing threat of Islamist-led terrorism and the security mandate facing the American military is arguably larger than it was a decade ago. Saying we need to spend less on the military so we can spend more for preparing for the next pandemic or bailing out this segment of the economy will not make the global security environment any less problematic.

Second, although the Trump Administration has increased the defense budget top line since coming to office, it hasn’t actually rebuilt the military, as the President likes to claim. The hole the military was in was too deep to be fixed that quickly.

The 1990s, under Bill Clinton’s purview, saw a “procurement holiday” with the end of the Cold War. The Bush Administration that followed spent more on defense but the vast amount of those dollars went to fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and paying the all-volunteer force to do so. Recapitalizing the force with new weapons was secondary. The Obama years saw further cuts, some by design by his team and some tied to the BCA’s mandate. For almost a quarter of a century, then, too little capability has been bought to ensure the American military can confidently carry out its security commitments in the world’s critical regions.

It’s true of course that China, Russia, and Iran will also suffer economically from the pandemic and, in theory, that might make it more difficult for them to expend greater sums for their own militaries. However, it’s also the case that authoritarian regimes can make budgetary decisions that, while not totally ignoring domestic concerns, can more readily prioritize their national ambitions over public approval. Indeed, China, Russia and Iran have all modernized their militaries despite any number of major domestic issues that need urgent addressing. In short, we shouldn’t expect the fallout of the drop in global economic performance to be evenly distributed between the United States and our main adversaries. The last global recession saw more, not less, confrontational behavior from Beijing and Moscow.

One would like, of course, to have America’s allies pick up the slack, but they too will face tough budgetary imperatives. Following the Great Recession, our major allies also cut spending, although not as deeply as the United States. Now, as the United States has begun to spend more, so, too, have our allies in Europe and Asia. It may not be as much, or as quickly as Washington would like, but well over a hundred billion dollars more has been committed to defense in recent years. The reality is: we cut; they will cut. If we want allies not to back away from their commitments and carry more of the load, then it’s in our interest to not slash our own defense budget.

For some, the answer to this dilemma is to radically draw back strategically. In the short term, that’s an easy fix. But whether it would be a lasting fix given the ambitions of America’s adversaries is a different question. With the Russian and Chinese economies slowing, and President Xi’s and Putin’s legitimacy waning, both may well be tempted to see adventures abroad as a way to recoup sway at home. There are plenty of potential flash points in Asia, Europe and the Middle East that would be attractive to take advantage of if the American military were gone and which would, if a conflict were to occur, likely require Washington to intervene to keep a whole region from being destabilized.

Pandemics are costly. But great power conflicts cost even more in blood and treasure.

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COVID-19 and the Weapons of the Future

The USS Ronald Reagan is tied up in the Japanese port of Yokosuka: Two of her crew have tested positive for COVID-19. USS Theodore Roosevelt, the other U.S. aircraft carrier in the West Pacific, is pier side at Guam with a skeletal crew aboard after 70 of her crew tested positive (this number has now grown to nearly 300). Until both ships can safely return to sea, U.S. deterrence and power projection abilities in the West Pacific are under great strain.

By coincidence, on March 19, the Navy successfully tested a major part of its hypersonic missile program, the missile’s glide body which is designed to carry conventional weapons. Development of hypersonic missiles would not only provide valuable information about how to defend against the hypersonic missiles that Russia claims it possesses and China is developing. It would also be an effective instrument in convincing these and other potential foes that it would be foolish to take advantage if U.S. naval forces are, for whatever reason, unable immediately to respond to crises.

Hypersonic weapons describe a family of delivery systems that travel at between Mach 5 and Mach 10—that is, at between one and two miles per second. In comparison, the U.S. Tomahawk flies at subsonic speeds, at around Mach 0.7—some 550 miles per hour. Tomahawk missiles were used in 2017 following the Syrian government’s chemical attacks and could reach a target 600 miles distant in about an hour; a hypersonic weapon could strike the same target in ten minutes.

These kinds of capabilities offer a strategically decisive advantage. A nation’s current ground and sea-based early-warning and air-defense systems are limited in a variety of ways, including by the earth’s curvature. A missile flying closer to the ground or sea can evade detection for longer than one with the high altitude of a ballistic trajectory. Detection and targeting takes time. To give you a sense of the figures involved, an Aegis Combat System responds to a threat in several seconds. A hypersonic weapon covering 20 miles in 10 seconds can scream past air defenses, evade intercepting missiles, and overcome point-defense systems.

Defenses are, of course, possible. Congress has provided the money and direction for the Defense Department to begin testing space-based sensors that can track hypersonic missiles by the end of next year. Tracking is the first and indispensable step in an effective defense. Satellites equipped with more advanced sensors, integrated with tracking and fire-control systems, could relay information to kill vehicles or directed-energy weapons that would intercept a hypersonic missile. U.S. defenses against hypersonics, however, do not exist today. Current U.S. anti-ballistic missile systems such as the Ground-based Midcourse Defense—systems that were designed to protect against ballistic missiles, including ICBMs—did not anticipate a maneuverable, hypersonic threat. Our adversaries understand this and are developing weapons to target not only our forward-deployed forces, but also the mainland.

Historically, hypersonic projectiles were first tested in the early Cold War. In 1949, the United States tested the two-stage hypersonic “Bumper” rocket, built from a WAC Corporal sounding rocket and a German V-2. It achieved Mach 6.7. A decade later, in 1959, the United States first tested the X-15, a hypersonic rocket-propelled aircraft. It also reached Mach 6.7, notably with aeronautical engineer and test pilot William J. Knight at the controls. The speed that hypersonic weapons travel at creates similar issues to those that these earlier atmospheric re-entry vehicles encountered. Only in the early 2000s did engineering progress enough to enable large-scale hypersonic testing and production. A fully hypersonic cruise missile (which travels at these speeds throughout its flight) or a “boost-glide” vehicle (which detaches from another system for its final attack phase) is today within the United States’ reach.

Russia has been the loudest in trumpeting its hypersonic program. Since March 2018, Russia has stated openly that it is modernizing its nuclear arsenal with the development of six new weapons. Western media focused upon two of these programs: the Poseidon nuclear-tipped torpedo and the Burevestnik nuclear-powered nuclear-armed cruise missile. The systems they have ignored are far more dangerous—its three hypersonic delivery vehicles.

Closest to operational deployment is the Kinzhal medium-range ballistic missile. An upgraded version of Russia’s ground-based Iskander-M short-range ballistic missile, the Kinzhal will be deployed on MiG-31K interceptors, likely carrying a 10-50 megaton warhead.  If carried on a MiG-31K, the Kinzhal’s 1,200-mile range excludes targeting U.S. territory.  Rather, the Kinzhal would be used to attack American and allied installations in Eastern Europe. They would be particularly useful in a confrontation over the Baltic.

Meanwhile, both the Avangard Boost-Glide Vehicle paired with the Sarmat ICBM, and the submarine-deployed Tsirkon Hypersonic cruise missile, would be able to target the United States. Indeed, Russian state media has suggested the Pentagon and Camp David as potential targets for Tsirkon-armed nuclear submarines. While Russia has grossly exaggerated the maturity of both the Avangard/Sarmat and Tsirkon, the fact of their being in development cannot be taken lightly. Not since the Cuban Missile Crisis has a foreign power so directly threatened American territory.

China has focused on building a universal hypersonic glide vehicle mechanism that it can deploy aboard several existing missile designs, upgrading them to hypersonic status. This strategy, while less flamboyant than Russia’s, is more concerning: China may be able to field operationally and strategically relevant hypersonic weapons within the next few years. The DF-17 Medium-Range Ballistic Missile and DF-41 Intercontinental Ballistic Missile are both expected to be hypersonic-capable when upgraded using the DF-ZF glide vehicle mechanism. Both missiles, particularly if armed with a nuclear warhead, can target U.S. Carrier Strike Groups and major air bases in the Western Pacific. Even the U.S. mainland is vulnerable due to the DF-ZF’s speed and maneuverability.

Technological challenges make comprehensive hypersonic defenses difficult at this time and the Department of Defense has not demonstrated a clear intent to invest the necessary resources to protect against these systems. The United States’ best policy, therefore, in the near term, is the development of an effective offense. American strategists have recognized the utility of hypersonic weapons, particularly in the Western Pacific against Chinese anti-access defense networks. Fortunately, U.S. defense planners have not sat on their hands. Research began in the early 2000s with the Prompt Global Strike program. Currently, the United States has eight hypersonic weapons programs, divided amongst the Navy, Army, Air Force, and DARPA. None, however, have produced more than an operational prototype.  That said, while the real maturity of Russian and Chinese programs remains unclear, the sheer diversity of tested U.S. systems demonstrates inherent American technical capacity. Still, absent a formal DoD program and a clear deployment timeline, the United States risks falling far behind its adversaries.

Of course, the contemporary Pentagon has other priorities. The Navy must fund its Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines and the Air Force its B-21 Raider bomber. The Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps will need to develop unmanned technologies or risk ceding air dominance to a peer adversary. Furthermore, the United States has not mass produced an advanced munition arguably since the Tomahawk cruise missile in the 1980s.  Throughout two decades of Middle Eastern counterinsurgency, the American munition of choice was the Joint Directed Attack Munition, a “dumb bomb” with a modified laser guidance system. It is as if the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, one of America’s premier rapid-response and warfighting tools, deployed to Iraq with Springfield bolt-action rifles and early-20th-century fixed machine guns, but sporting modern scopes and wearing body armor. Against a lower-level threat, updated technology may be effective. But Chinese and Russian infantry divisions use modern weapons and technology.

We therefore face not simply budgetary issues, but structural choices within the U.S. defense establishment. Without a budget increase, current U.S. force structure projections are unachievable. Yet, even before imagining the vast sums that will now be spent because of the coronavirus, the U.S. defense budget was facing budget cuts in the coming years. The United States therefore risks choosing between a medium-sized fleet entirely unready for combat and a much smaller fleet fielding modern weapons, but easily overwhelmed by a numerically superior, technologically equal adversary.

Over one hundred years ago, Europe’s great commanders readied their armies for war, putting their faith in the power of an offensive first-strike. As history recounts, when titans clashed in Flanders Fields, neither side could best the other; technical, tactical, and operational parity led to bloody stalemate. These commanders understood the risks of the offensive but hoped to forestall a ruinous continental conflagration through quick victory.  They failed. But similar leaders scarcely a generation later put their faith in the same offensive punch: this time German armies sped past their Anglo-French adversaries, securing a victory that led to four years of Hitlerite occupation and the deaths of millions. Fortunately, grand strategic considerations weighed against them, and the Grand Alliance between East and West liberated Europe from a barbaric tyrant.

With a similarly perceived technological, tactical, and operational advantage afforded by hypersonic weapons, perhaps America’s contemporary adversaries would calculate as her historical ones did and opt for a punishing offensive. Perhaps America would win this war, its grand strategic position weighing in its favor once again. Alternatively, our strength may deteriorate sufficiently to enable Chinese victory. We may sleep soundly for now. But we risk being awakened from our imagined security by the choice between surrender or devastation.

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