Category Archives: ethics

America’s Future—Foreign Policy Principles, Part IV

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I have posted here (which has links to my other posts on this subject) on other aspects of our necessary future foreign policy.  In this post, I want to talk about principles of policy application given an understanding of who  our friends, our allies, our enemies, and our foes are; in a closely related post, I talk briefly about how to recognize our friends, allies, enemies, and foes.

As I have written before, the mindset within which our policy decisions are made must be that of American leadership in the 21st century.  We are not just one among many nations; our national security requires that we maintain that leadership.  While being the leader brings its own constraints to our freedom of action, we can choose not to accept those constraints when our security requires.  Being led (and we either lead or be led; there is no middle ground) has constraints on our freedom of action that are far more binding.  Nor is it hubris to suggest that the national security of our friends requires that leadership, as well, if only because they are not strong enough in their own right: our own security demands the security of our friends.

Accordingly, our foreign policy decisions must be founded on what is best for the United States, and our responses to other nations’ words and behaviors must be made within that framework.  Reading and understanding those behaviors, though, demand coldly objective and highly skilled foreign policy personnel in the State Department.  It is necessary to be able to discriminate between legitimately competitive behavior and behavior that is (directly or indirectly) inimical to our national interests, and our policy personnel must be equal to that task.

Within the framework, then, of understanding the relationships the various nations and non-national organizations have with us for the time, what should we do?

How should we shape our foreign policy?

In what follows, I will limit myself to relationships involving our enemies and foes.  To be sure, interacting with our friends and allies also is important, and especially with them it’s too easy to act on auto-pilot, taking them for granted.  But they are not threats to us, and so I will leave that topic for another post.

In responding to, and in following up on, an action or a collection of actions, we must follow a clear, predefined sequence of steps (although both the steps and their sequence must themselves be flexible enough to handle disparate situations—no two sets of encounters can be identical).  Again, the purpose of diplomacy is to resolve differences, even with those who oppose us, through peaceful means and to influence others through peaceful activities.  It is the purpose of the State Department to lead in these endeavors, and our national foreign policy is the tool set through which these endeavors are attempted.

Our necessary first step in any interaction with an opponent (whether a nation or non-national organization) is to obtain in our own minds a clear understanding of the consequences for us and for others (most especially our friends and allies) of the opposing entity’s activities.  This must be followed by obtaining in our own minds a clear understanding of what might be termed the victory conditions: the outcomes we must have for the sake of our (for the rest of this post, I’ll subsume our friends and allies into “our”) national security and our continued freedom of action on the planet.  (It’s important to note that this step is highly important to our domestic policy set, also.)

Another step (not of necessity a second step; time constraints may not permit this order in every instance) is to engage with the entity(s) (from here on, I’ll subsume nation and non-national organization into such collective terms) diplomatically.  This is useful for a couple of reasons.  First, it might actually work: with a clear explanation of the consequences to us of the offending entity’s actions, we will demonstrate both that we know and that we know they know those consequences.   Following this with a clear explanation of the consequences to them of their continuing their actions may persuade them to desist.  This step is unlikely to succeed, however; we must assume the leadership of the entity in question is highly intelligent and highly motivated, they know what they are doing and the effect of their actions on us, and they’re doing those things, anyway.  But the second reason for attempting this first, where possible, is frankly political: if we can go to other nations that have a stake in the dispute having already attempted diplomatic solutions, we will be more likely to succeed in taking the next step in the sequence.

This next step is to attempt to form a coalition of nations for the purpose of attaining a political encirclement and constraint (note that constraint is the goal; encirclement is only a tool for achieving the goal) of the entity(s) in question.  The encirclement need not be geographical to achieve constraint; political and/or economic encirclement will constrain, as well.  Further, this constraint must be real: it cannot leave loopholes; likewise, attempts to evade the constraints must themselves have clear consequences that are plainly more costly than any gains from the evasion.  Failure to meet this condition is the reason most internationally applied sanctions fail: they are insufficient to constrain and/or they are too easily evaded.

Key to either of these two steps is our own credibility.  If our efforts are perceived as just talk—what China often refers to as being a paper tiger—then our efforts are still-born.  This, for instance, is why northern Korea has nuclear weapons and Iran is about to achieve them.  When the Bush administration found northern Korea in violation of the terms of the Agreed Framework in 2002, it notified the Congress of that fact, which by law triggered some mandatory responses, including the cessation of all aid to northern Korea.  But, symptomatic of our own lack of seriousness, there was much debate within the administration over whether we should even take the formal action of notifying Congress.  Yet there could be no debate over the existence of the violation: this was a matter that could be verified or falsified on the basis of hard fact.  The very existence of the debate over whether to report the violation is the proof of our own lack of resolution.  Further, when the administration did report the fact of the violation, it asked for an exemption for $95 million in aid to be continued.  Of course, regardless of intent, northern Korea responded logically: they read the waffling and the exception as our own lack of determination. Our diplomacy was just idle chit-chat, they went about their purpose, and today they have nuclear weapons.

So it is with Iran.  Despite the failure of the Bush administration’s repeated attempts to deal with Iran diplomatically to dissuade them from attempting to obtain nuclear weapons, the present administration has simply done more of the same.  Certainly, the Obama administration has obtained “sanctions” against Iran, but with Russia and China actively opposing more than lip service sanctions, and with Germany and Japan actively trading with Iran for oil, the sanctions, and the ever-increasingly sterner talk from us, has been correctly understood by the Iranians as just idle chit-chat, and of no consequence.

But we cannot necessarily wait on the remonstrations or on the constraints from encirclement (for instance) to take effect, even were those potentially effective.  Excessive delays in favor of getting an international response coordinated first are foolish—at best they allow the damage to us to grow and constraints on our own freedom of action to increase, and dangerously so.  When it becomes clear that those steps are not working, or results are not occurring quickly enough (and we must make this decision quickly, without dithering), then we must act unilaterally.  There comes a time when State must accept that their diplomatic efforts are not working, and the reasons for the failure—whether State missed the boat, or the diplomatic process cannot work in the present circumstances, or our enemy simply is unresponsive to diplomacy—are irrelevant.

It’s also important to understand that we can take unilateral actions (and often we must take these actions) while our other diplomatic efforts are in progress without interfering with those efforts.  What unilateral actions can we take?  There are several; I suggest these by way of illustration.  (Military actions I’ll leave to later posts.)

Unilateral actions include the relatively benign, such as our military shipping, on being harassed, ignoring the harassment, and continuing on its way, including being rammed—collided with—as a result of the other nation’s shipping losing its intimidation game of chicken.  Unilateral actions include applying tariffs to targeted—or all—trade goods from the offending entity.  They include embargoing those goods.  They include freezing the offending entity’s bank accounts, up to and including refusing to deal with that nation’s central banking facility or its financial network entirely.  To be sure, such economic sanctions will harm agents of our own economy, but that harm is already occurring at an unacceptable level—it’s why we’re responding in the first place.  Economic sanctions will be leaky, absent participation by an encircling coalition, but this is no reason to leave the offending entity entirely unscathed.

But more important than these application principles, are the principles of pushing the pace and of maintaining the engagement until our goals are realized.  There can be no “graduated responses,” no “nuanced ‘dialog’ or series of actions and reactions.”  We learned—and we must remember—the lesson in this regard from our Viet Nam war: gradually escalating does not dissuade the enemy; it only allows him to adjust and to act with greater effect.   Our actions in response to the offending behaviors must inflict greater cost than the enemy is gaining from his actions to which we’re objecting, and the application of our responses must be faster than the offending entity can respond, they must be inside his decision cycle.  Further, we may not necessarily know his tolerance for pain; it behooves us to over-punish rather than risk our opponent believing we’re weaker and not interested in a real fight.  Doing this lets us seize the initiative from the offending entity, and it enables us to hold the initiative.

Additionally, we must not disengage until our goals have been satisfied.  In concert with keeping up the pace, we must keep applying ever-increasing pressure until then.  To paraphrase a fundamental principle of the self defense system of Krav Maga, “Finish him!”  Disengagement before true completion is not materially different from graduated responses: it gives that offending entity space in which to regain his balance, to regroup, and to come at us again, with better organization and stronger effect.  And even more emotional commitment to damage or destroy us in response to our damage to him.

If the principles outlined in this post seem martial, they are not very.  It’s important to keep in mind that military and diplomatic actions are not mutually exclusive: as Clausewitz understood 180 years ago, they are two areas of a continuum.  Finally, the principles I’ve outlined are not new;  they represent no breakthrough in diplomatic technique.  The real keys, here, are that accelerated pace (especially compared to traditional diplomacy) coupled with a continuing pressured engagement.  These are paramount; they are the keys to driving the situation to resolution in accordance with our goals and not those of our enemy.  Success here will make future attempts less likely.  On the other hand, accepting the others’ actions without consequence to them only makes our failure, and future challenges, more likely as we’ve already seen with northern Korea and Iran and with an increasingly belligerent China.

Do Progressives Represent all Americans?

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I don’t often read the jobs welfare program for hack journalists that is The New York Times, but a post by Neptunus Lex drew my attention.

The answer to my question is—apparently not.

As Thomas Edsall writes,

…preparations by Democratic operatives for the 2012 election make it clear for the first time that the party will explicitly abandon the white working class.

…in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment — professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists — and a second, substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African-American and Hispanic.

As Lex points out, the chosen classes for this Progressive blatantly open class warfare election campaign, does not include educated Americans who do constructive work—doctors, for instance.  Or engineers.  Or scientists.  Or technologists.

Nor need the middle class, of any stripe, apply.  Nor any Americans of Asian heritage, regardless of their “class.”  The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King longed for the day when men would not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.  The Democratic Party itself claims to have fought for the interests of working families and equal opportunities for all Americans for 200 years.  But apparently some groups should have prior claim to these things.  Other groups can come for the ride, maybe, but if they do, they gotta sit in back.

Why is the Party of Obama pushing this divisive class against class, group against group, warfare?  Edsall is clear here, too: so that Obama and his cohorts can get re-elected.

Obama’s alternative path to victory…would be to keep his losses among all white voters at the same level John Kerry did in 2004, when he lost them by 17 points, 58-41….  Obama can afford to drop to Kerry’s white margins because, between 2008 and 2012, the pro-Democratic minority share of the electorate is expected to grow…and the white share to decline….

Their campaign has nothing at all to do with leading our country, or offering solutions to our economic problems.  Just personal political gain.  No matter the divisions he attempts to inflict in the process.

Who’s setting the dogs on whom?

Distorting the Question

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There they go again.

Senator Dick Durbin (D, IL) suggests that the Republicans are being a tad disingenuous with their reluctance to extend the payroll tax “cut” of two per centage points on employee payrolls.  Pretending to not understand the reluctance, Durbin asserts

The Republican position is they’d raise the payroll tax on working families.  That just defies logic.  What we should do is to help these working families struggle through.

What defies logic, though, as Durbin understands full well, is the concept of reducing the payroll tax in the first place.  Regardless of what we might think of the present structure of Social Security and Medicare, the fact is both of these programs are within just a very few election cycles of being utterly bankrupt, and the payroll tax is the only way—by design—of funding these programs.  Reducing that funding only hastens those failures.

Americans aren’t as dumb as Progressives like Durbin would have it, either, and so we’re fully capable of seeing the foolishness of a payroll tax cut, and we’re fully capable of not confusing such a cut with an income tax cut.  Indeed, far from the jobs stimulus the Progressives claimed this would be when President Obama proposed the cut, most Americans promptly saved those few extra bucks, or used them to pay down personal debt.  Of course, since businesses had no such cuts to their payroll expenses, they received no incentive to hire, and the missing “cut” spending potentiated that lack.

Aside from this, though, the Durbin claim is little more than a Progressive distortion of the opposition party’s tax position.  To use the payroll tax reluctance in this way—as a “demonstration” that Republicans want to raise taxes in the middle of this deep recession—is to isolate one irrelevant position, payroll taxes that have nothing to do with jobs and everything to do with the way Social Security and Medicare are funded, and to ignore the whole position: that lower income and business tax rates are themselves job creators and further that they increase tax revenue through increased economic activity—producing, selling, hiring—which leads to additional hiring in a virtuous circle.  Which “help[s] these working families struggle through.”

Further, Republicans have been advocating for some time closing tax loopholes and ending subsidies as an additional means of raising revenues, another aspect of their composite tax position that Durbin carefully elides.  And his distortion ignores the fact  that the Progressives themselves insist on outright tax rate increases—to the tune of $1 trillion, as Obama threw in at  the last second to blow up an already tentatively agreed deal during the debt limit increase talks last summer, and which the six Progressives on the recently deceased Supercommittee used to blow up that group’s chances of fulfilling its mandate.

Then Durbin added a wholly irrelevant canard to explain Obama’s absence from the just concluded Supercommittee charade:

This was a congressional undertaking. And the Republicans made it clear that if President Obama weighed in, it would become another presidential issue.

Really?  In what way?  Durbin chooses to offer no facts to support his assertion.  He does choose to ignore, though, the fact that Obama has repeatedly refused Republican invitations to talk about any economic matter, preferring instead to hit the campaign trail and to dally in Bali for East Asia summit talks.

Texas Redistricting

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As a result of the 2010 census, Texas picked up four additional Congressional districts, four House of Representatives seats in the Federal Congress.  Pursuant to this, the Texas legislature redrew the existing district map to create those four additional districts.

Of course, someone’s ox is going to be gored by such a remapping, and Texas was sued in Federal court as some groups were unhappy that they hadn’t been favored enough by the new map.

Here’s where it gets interesting.  The primary reason the Federal government has any say at all over how a State sets is Congressional districts is carried in the Voting Rights Act of 1965: this law gives the Federal government, in the form of its Federal courts, the authority to approve or disapprove Congressional district maps of certain enumerated States before those maps can take effect, and Texas is one of those enumerated.  However, and this is key, the purpose of that prior approval requirement is to prevent racial gerrymandering.

The District Court for the District of Columbia rejected the Texas Legislature-drawn district map and sent the case to the District Court for the San Antonio Division of the federal court system for trial.  The San Antonio federal court then proceeded to draw its own district map, which is far out of the jurisdiction of the Federal courts.  This drew, correctly, a sharp reaction from Texas’ Attorney General Greg Abbott as he announced his emergency appeal to the Supreme Court to stay this Federal intrusion into a State’s internal affairs.

A court’s job is to apply the law, not to make policy.  A federal court lacks constitutional authority to interfere with the expressed will of the state Legislature unless it is compelled to remedy a specific, identifiable violation of law.

Beyond this, though, is what the San Antonio District Court did with its map.  The court’s own map would ensure minorities made up the majority in three of the additional four districts.  This is exactly the racial gerrymandering to which the Voting Rights Act authorized the Federal courts to object.

Even larger, though, is this: either we’re all Americans, each of whose vote is as valuable as the others’, or we’re not, and government-favored groups get louder, stronger votes than those disfavored by government.  It’s plain where one Federal judge’s sentiments lie.

Energy Consumption and Quality of Life

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Power Line displays a graph that is one of several from an article by Oil Drum that shows a developing relationship between energy consumption and GDP growth, and it’s reproduced here:

Growth in world energy consumption

Growth in world energy consumption

This graph summarizes a series of national-level graphs and it indicates an increasingly tight coupling between energy growth and GDP growth.  As Power Line and Oil Drum point out, this has implications for any ability to reduce, at least in the near-term, dependency on CO2-based energy in our economies.  Aside from the fact that CO2-based energy has never been shown to be inherently bad—anthropogenic climate change, according to an increasingly deep and broad fossil record, seems a non-event—I want to talk about some other implications of this coupling, and I’ll do that with the explicit assumption that GDP is a good enough stand-in for the quality of life of the world’s inhabitants.

We have reached a point in the improvement of our quality of life where it’s no longer possible, for instance, merely to plant more acres in order to grow more food; it’s no longer possible merely to hire more calculator operators to do more calculations; it’s no longer possible to do more science simply by observing with the naked eye, or with crudely ground glass lenses, the world around us.  It’s no longer possible to increase our comforts in our homes simply by burning more wood in the fireplace.  We need more and better technologies.  It’s technology that produces the medicines that help us defeat yesterday’s killer diseases and will help us against today’s and tomorrow’s, it’s technology that produces and improves the computers underlying and controlling our infrastructure and personal activities, that manages the technologies that let us do the science that make our lives better and that underlie tomorrow’s technological and scientific advances that continue this spiraling cycle of improvement.

But each new advance in technology needs more energy to sustain it and it took more energy to develop it.  The increase in energy use shown in the graph isn’t driven only by population growth yielding more people to consume energy; that growth is driven by the increasing energy demands that an increasing quality of life represents.

We’re faced with a choice, then, as GDP increases and energy consumption increases become tied to each other: do we continue to develop our technologies and the energy to support them so that our GDP, our quality of life, can continue to improve, or do we say enough—this is as good as it gets, stop the improvement train?

I decline the Malthusian solution.  But to do otherwise requires more of that CO2-based energy, more of those fossil fuels.  Whatever we might think of alternative energy sources, they aren’t ready for market.  They can’t produce the energy in the amounts we need to supplement what we have, much less to replace much of it.  Not only are market prices not able to compete—and forcing them would damage our economy even more than it already is—the production efficiencies aren’t there, either.  The energy density of a solar cell doesn’t compare with the energy density of a unit of oil or gas, even if the cell will last longer than the unit of oil or gas.  Subsidizing the alternate energy sources doesn’t answer the problem, either; this merely shifts the price from the utility bill to the tax bill.

A partial answer, then, demands that we increase fossil fuel production, and this demands that the government get out of the way of this increase.  Travesties like the Keystone XL pipeline delay must be undone.  Off shore drilling must be allowed, dry-land drilling must be allowed, fracking must be allowed, and so on.  The government’s regulations that impede these must be withdrawn.  So, too must the regulations that enable frivolous environmental lawsuits and their delays be withdrawn.  For example, despite three years of environmental study for the Keystone XL project, despite the existence of 25,000 miles of oil and gas pipeline already criss-crossing the Oglala Aquifer, additional suits are permitted.  For example, a solar farm in the desert on the other side of the mountains from Los Angeles cannot deliver its green electricity to the city because environmentalists object to every plausible route along which the power lines needed to carry the electricity might run.  For example, a wind farm off the Martha’s Vineyard coast has been blocked by NIMBYers convincing the FAA to rule that the windmills would present a hazard to aviation.  Delays like these simply increase the importance of fossil fuel production.

So, too, must the subsidies, which only inflate the cost of the thing being subsidized, whether oil and gas or “green” energy, be withdrawn.

But the rest of the answer demands that we need energy from all sources.  We need the solar energy, the wind energy, the nuclear energy (and cheap fusion energy is just around the corner.  Still).  But these can’t be forced into the market before their time.  Solar energy remains roughly three times more expensive than fossil-fuel (CO2-based) energy for the consumer.  Permitting requirements can double the cost of building a nuclear power plant, and we still don’t have a place set up in which to store spent fuel—even though a suitable location has been identified.

When any other element of our infrastructure, a road or a bridge or a stretch of railroad line, for instance, has utility, then it can be sold on that basis.  Again, so it is with “green” energy.  When those sources have utility, when they are useful in the market place for the end users, then these can also be sold to us on that basis.  Neither energy source needs to hyped on the basis, for instance, of the jobs that will be created.  Those jobs will appear automatically from the need to produce to satisfy the market’s demand.