The Trump administration issued an $89 million warning to other countries. But the message has its limits.
Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, has portrayed the cruise-missile blitz as an $89 million warning not just to Syria, but to other rogue nations like North Korea.
.. “The message that any nation can take is if you violate international norms, if you violate international agreements, if you fail to live up to commitments, if you become a threat to others, at some point a response is likely to be undertaken,” Tillerson
.. But is the Trump administration learning the right lessons from the Syria campaign? And is the message they’re sending as powerful as they seem to think it is?
.. The North Korean government, for its part, claims to have drawn the opposite conclusion from Trump’s bombing campaign: that the only way to prevent the United States from attacking it too is to develop a fearsome nuclear deterrent.
.. There could be “millions of casualties if something like this were to happen,” the Korea expert Victor Cha recently told me, and all for a military operation that would only temporarily set back North Korea’s weapons program.
..the first few days of the fight would be critical if we were to have any chance of protecting Seoul. To do so, we would have to get the chemical-delivery systems, the missile sites, and the nuclear sites before the North Koreans had a chance to use them. To accomplish all this we would need to carry out 4,000 air sorties a day in the first days of the conflict. In Iraq, in contrast, we had carried out 800 a day.
.. “My understanding is that we cannot protect Seoul, at least for the first twenty-four hours of a war, and maybe for the first forty-eight.”
.. “In the event of a North Korean attack, U.S. forces, working side by side with the South Korean army and using bases in Japan, would quickly destroy the North Korean army and the North Korean regime. But … [t]he intensity of combat would be greater than any the world has witnessed since the last Korean War.”
All the President’s Generals
So has the ideological revolution in U.S. foreign policy been canceled? In one sense, yes: If you were expecting Trump to actually govern as a paleoconservative, to eschew the use of force absent some immediate threat to the American homeland, to pull U.S. troops out of all their far-flung bases and leave entangling alliances behind, then the strikes against Bashar al-Assad are the latest evidence that you got played.
Most recent presidencies have been distinguished by tugs of war between different groups of foreign policy hands —
- neoconservatives and
- Kissingerians and
- Jacksonians
under Republicans,
- liberal interventionists and
- liberal realists and the
- antiwar left
under Democrats.
.. Rex Tillerson may have a realist streak and Nikki Haley a moralistic style, but neither one has been part of these debates before. Mike Pence has nothing like the experience of a Dick Cheney or a Joe Biden. If Bannon’s vision is getting sidelined, it’s not like Jared Kushner is ready with a deeply thought-out alternative.
.. What Trump has instead are generals — James Mattis and H. R. McMaster and the other military men in his cabinet, plus, of course, the actual professional military itself. And it’s this team of generals, not any of the usual foreign policy schools, that seems increasingly likely to steer his statecraft going forward.
.. The professional military always influences U.S. foreign policy, and military minds are hardly monolithic in their views. (Just ask Gen. Michael Flynn.) But for American policy to be effectively military-directed, as opposed to just military-influenced, would be a new thing in recent U.S. history, with strong implications for how the weakening Pax Americana gets defended in the age of Trump.
.. a military-directed foreign policy promises to be more stability-oriented than other approaches to international affairs. It would be less prone to grand ideological ambitions than either liberal hawkishness or neoconservatism — less inclined to imagine the U.S. as an agent of democratic revolution or a humanitarian avenging angel. But it would also be skeptical of the shifts in our strategic posture and retreats from existing commitments that realists and anti-interventionists sometimes entertain.
.. had the U.S. military been running George W. Bush’s White House, it’s unlikely that we would have attempted to plant democracy in Iraq. Had it been running the Obama administration, it’s unlikely that we would have abandoned Hosni Mubarak or sought a region-reshaping détente with Tehran.
.. the Trump White House’s re-emphasis on longstanding military relationships (with the Sunni Arab states, especially), its quieter line on human rights and its backpedaling from promised big-deal shifts in our posture toward Russia and China all fit with what you might expect from a brass-led presidency.
.. even as it prizes stability, the military has a strong bias toward, well, military solutions whenever crises or challenges emerge. These solutions are not usually huge invasions or expensive nation-building exercises. But they treat bombs and missiles and drone strikes and (in limited, extractable numbers) boots on the ground as first-resort tools of statecraft.
.. Overall, the armed forces’ worldview — a status-quo bias plus doses of hard power
.. the president’s inability to back down from a big fight meets the military’s willingness to start a lot of small ones lies the great peril of his presidency: not deliberate warmongering, but an accidental escalation that his generals encourage, and that the ultimate decider has no idea how to stop.
Trudeau ‘Not Pleased’ With Bombardier Executive Pay Packages
Transport-equipment maker, recipient of over $1 billion in recent government aid, offers to defer partial 2016 compensation for executives after public rebuke
.. Mr. Trudeau said his Liberal government was “not pleased” with pay raises ranging from 36% to 93% that Bombardier’s board approved for the six top executives of the ailing Montreal transportation-equipment maker, which has gotten more than $1 billion in government funding over the course of 16 months from both the federal and the Quebec provincial governments.
Report: Israel Passes U.S. Military Technology to China
Secret U.S. missile and electro-optics technology was transferred to China recently by Israel, prompting anger from the U.S. and causing a senior Israeli defense official to resign.
.. Israel has a long record of getting U.S. military technology to China.
In the early 1990s then-CIA Director James Woolsey told a Senate Government Affairs Committee that Israel had been selling U.S. secrets to China for about a decade. More than 12 years ago the U.S. demanded Israel cancel a contract to supply China with Python III missiles, which included technology developed by the U.S. for its Sidewinder missiles, The Associated Press reported in 2002.