Leaving town for about two weeks. No memos for a while and for those who are active in the market, generally when I leave markets increase their volatility, not necessarily direction. Have a great two weeks.===================
While away I expect another report on the FBI's shenanigans to be released by the inspector general of the Justice Department as well as information about how the Democrats, with Obama's concurrence, had a plant among the ranks of the Trump presidential campaign
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Walter Russel Mead lays out Obama and Trump's approach with Iran.
Obama thought we should shrink and Trump believes we should expand.
I have always embraced the Trump view towards bullies. Rub their nose in the dirt and focus on their weaknesses because their citizens will eventually not support their continued tyrannical subjugation given hope.
Because of Israel's effective air raids it has caused fissures to develop between Iran and Russia. (See 1 below.)
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I have been warning and writing about this for years. (See 2 below.)
For what it is worth my views are:
A) Russia will remain a weak irritant.
b) China is our greatest potential threat.
c) N Korea's leader could well understand economic growth leads to stability and lengthens his prospects of staying in control and Trump might be able to tame this tiger.
d) Iran is not a strong power and with Israel, Saudi Arabia and America pressing them hard they can implode from within. It could be bloody.
e) Strength backed by rational use of power beats fecklessness every time but, the problem is that our State Department is invested in talk not action.
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Dick
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1) Trump, Iran and American Power
The president sees Tehran’s overreach as an opportunity to arrest U.S. decline.
By Walter Russell MeadAmerica’s withdrawal from the Iran deal and relocation of its Israeli embassy to Jerusalem send an unmistakable signal about the emerging Trump foreign policy: The administration wants to enlarge American power rather than adjust to decline. For now at least, the Middle East is the centerpiece of this new assertiveness.
For President Obama, Iran’s rise was an unavoidable fact. Confronting Iran meant risking a war even bigger and uglier than the one in Iraq. Mr. Obama wasn’t only personally opposed to such a war, he believed that neither Congress nor public opinion would sustain it. The era in which the U.S. could dominate the Middle East was over; the wisest course was to negotiate an arrangement that would protect core U.S. interests and cover for an American withdrawal.
The Iran deal, President Obama and his supporters believe, accomplished all that and more. By taking the nuclear issue off the table, at least for the time being, the agreement averted the danger of a U.S.-Iranian military confrontation. Moreover, it weakened hard-liners inside Iran by undermining their core argument that Iran faced an external threat requiring permanent social mobilization even as it strengthened moderates by tying the country ever more closely to the world economy. If supported by the West, the Obama administration believed, moderates would gradually consign the Islamists to the political fringes.
From this perspective, the deal was a masterstroke of diplomacy. Its supporters now fear that Iranian and American hard-liners, energized by the failure of their more accommodating rivals, will steer the countries toward a policy of confrontation ending in war—and that the result of this war will be to accelerate rather than retard American decline in the Middle East and beyond.
President Trump’s approach is different. His instincts tell him that most Americans are anything but eager for a “post-American” world. Mr. Trump’s supporters don’t want long wars, but neither are they amenable to a stoic acceptance of national decline. As to the wisdom of accommodating Iran, Team Trump believes that empowering Iran is more likely to strengthen the hard-liners than the moderates. As Franklin Roosevelt once put it in a fireside chat, “No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it.”
The Trump administration believes that far from forcing a U.S. retreat, Iranian arrogance and overreach in the Middle East have created a golden opportunity for the assertion of American power. It hopes the emerging alliance of Arabs and Israelis will give America local partners who are ready to bear many of the risks and costs of an anti-Iran policy in exchange for American backing. Israeli air power and Arab forces, combined with the intelligence networks and local relationships the new allies bring to the table, can put Iran on the defensive in Syria and elsewhere. This military pressure, along with economic pressure from a new round of sanctions, will weaken Iran’s hold on its proxies abroad and create political problems for the mullahs at home. If they respond by restarting their nuclear program, Israeli-American airstrikes could both stop the process and inflict a humiliating blow to the regime’s prestige.
At that point, Team Trump believes, Iran will be faced with a different kind of negotiation, one in which the U.S. and its allies are in a position of strength. In addition to accepting limits on its nuclear activities, optimists hope, Iran would also scale back its regional ambitions. Syria’s future would be determined by the Arabs, Iran would accept Iraq as a neutral buffer state between it and the Sunni Arab world, and an uneasy peace would prevail.
This approach might be unpopular with America’s European partners, but it resonates with the Middle Eastern allies on whose support the strategy depends. The Trump administration recognizes that, and its strong backing of Arab and Israeli priorities—President Sisi’s government in Egypt, Saudi Arabia’s military campaign in Yemen, the Jerusalem embassy—reflects the demands of coalition diplomacy. Expect more of this. Rewarding useful allies is a cornerstone of the Trumpian approach to foreign policy. The more active America’s Middle East allies, the smaller the risk of heavy American engagement in a Middle East ground war.
The administration has now made its intentions clear. It seeks a neo-American era in world politics rather than a post-American one, and it has chosen the Middle East as the testing ground for its new approach. The biggest questions the new national security team must now ask itself are: How deeply, and for how long, is the president committed to this approach—and will he continue to support it if, as often happens in the Middle East, something goes wrong?
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2) America Can’t Afford to Cede the Seas
Does the U.S. want to continue as a great power? China’s navy is set to surpass our fleet by 2030.
By Seth Cropsey
American sea power has secured the Pacific since the end of World War II, assuring safe and open trade, while defusing conflict throughout the region. Maintaining a powerful navy for these ends is hardly an American innovation: No great state or empire has ever retained its status without pre-eminent sea power. The histories of Athens, Venice, Spain, Holland and England show that losing control of the oceans leads ineluctably to losing great-power status.
The rapid growth and improvement of China’s naval forces is the major challenge to American sea dominance today, and likely for the foreseeable future. Retired Capt. James Fanell, former director of intelligence for the U.S. Pacific Fleet, stated in 2015 that China’s combat fleet will reach 415 ships in 2030. Beijing is particularly focused on adding submarines, amphibious vessels and small surface combatants. The buildup demonstrates China’s clear intention to dominate in coastal regions and amphibious operations—domains in which the U.S. has pre-eminence today.
As Adm. Phil Davidson, nominated to lead the U.S. Pacific Command, told the Senate in April: China “is no longer a rising power but an arrived great power and peer competitor.” He added that “China has undergone a rapid military modernization over the last three decades and is approaching parity in a number of critical areas; there is no guarantee that the United States would win a future conflict with China.”
The White House has proposed expanding the U.S. Navy to 355 ships, but its plan is too slow and underfunded. The full fleet would not be complete until 2050 at the earliest. Although President Trump proposes to dedicate $20 billion for new ship construction in 2019, and about the same in constant dollars in each of the next five years, the Congressional Budget Office estimates the project requires an additional $6.6 billion a year over the next 30 years. Without increased funding, the fleet will be smaller in three decades than it is today, and China’s navy could surpass it by 2030.
Americans would quickly see the consequences of ceding power in the Pacific. Already, China’s growing navy may soon aim to control movement around the first island chain in the East China Sea, which stretches from Japan to the Philippines.
If Beijing gains control of the region, it could hamper America’s coordination with its allies and cast doubt on the U.S. security umbrella. The White House would find it more difficult to prevent distant crises from escalating into direct threats. American business around the world, meanwhile, would be decimated. China would suddenly become the more appealing partner for trade and security. The global maritime order, which has long maintained that the East and South China Seas are international waters, would be replaced by a regional system based on “Chinese characteristics”—the euphemism by which the Chinese Communist Party refers to its brand of state control.
This is not a fait accompli; American sea power can be restored. But it will require the U.S. to decide that its status as the world’s great power is worth preserving. The Navy’s evolutionary approach to modernizing its fleet must be replaced by a revolutionary approach, increasing the current fleet’s technological advantage. And by 2035, the fleet should be expanded to no fewer than 375 ships.
The U.S. must also prepare to engage China’s navy. That means situating U.S. forces within striking distance of the East and South China Seas, with enough troops on hand to police the region effectively. It also means responding in kind to China’s existing provocations. The U.S. should bolster its military and naval support for Taiwan. The Pentagon should lean forward by actively planning to defend the entire first island chain, as well as to blockade the Southeast Asia straits, through which oil from the Middle East now flows to China.
Conflict may come sooner than most Americans imagine. This month alone, Beijing is reported to have placed anti-ship cruise missiles and surface-to-air missiles on three artificial islands in the South China Sea. The U.S. also recently said that American military pilots in Djibouti have been hit with lasers fired from a new Chinese base. The Pentagon has filed a diplomatic démarche requesting that China investigate, but mere diplomacy won’t suffice in the game Beijing is playing.
Timidity deters nothing. It encourages the increasing Chinese aggression. But so far America’s plans to upgrade the U.S. combat fleet have been diffident. To remain the world’s dominant maritime force, U.S. sea power will have to be trained, equipped and exercised. On this rests the future of the U.S. as a great power.
Mr. Cropsey is director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for American Seapower. He was a naval officer and a deputy undersecretary of the Navy in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.
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