Charlie: Vincent Arguimbau is a Libertarian commentator on business and foreign affairs despite having read the New York Times from cover to cover for over fifty years. He argues that business is easy to understand compare to foreign affairs which has no real markers from which to score success or failure. He uses a Realpolitik lense to consider alternatives to our recent penchant for military intervention and interminable wars. I am proud to have him here for the first time. I see you were reading The Times when you were at Carolina.
Vincent: Yes. I remember Jesse Helms, who was the local Rush Limbaugh before going on to be U.S. Senator from North Carolina, called Chapel Hill, Communist Hill. As a Goldwater Republican I thought he had a weak grasp of his ideology if he thought it couldn’t withstand the study of another. At that time I wasn’t a Nixon supporter nor vehemently anti the Vietnam War, most likely because of a high number in the draft lottery, but I read about and admired the opening to China. Reading Kissinger’s book later in the decade gave me a basic grasp of Realpolitik which has been bouncing around in my head for decades.
Charlie: Wasn’t Realpolitik discredited for you with Kissinger’s apparent approval of the coup in Chile which murdered President Salvador Allende and thousands of his young socialist supporters?
Vincent: No, South America is not a Realpolitik arena because it has no hegemonic powers. On the other hand the China opening was an assessment it was a power with which we needed to accommodate despite having to give up Taiwan, a loyal friend and ally Understanding and accommodating regional powers has a pacifying tension reducing effect which is certainly better than declaring a power as an implacable enemy, such as we do with Iran today.
Charlie: You want to understand and accommodate Iran?
Vincent: Yes, you of all people you should agree. I found your interviews with Iran’s nuclear deal negotiator Javad Sharif to be with a person speaking for country with a strong will to protect their own yet reasonable. Iran went through a horrific war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq so calling Iran an implacable enemy gets us nothing while understanding their need for security and their local advantage over ours would go a long way toward drawing down our wasted military effort in the region.
Charlie: Such as?
Vincent: Well this is where I go far afield in the diplomatic sense by considering the balkanization of region. I mean if a regime is dysfunctional why respect the whimsically drawn up borders that pit antagonist tribes against each other? It’s a simple view but when George W. Bush toppled Saddam Hussein he took out the regime that held Iraq together. General Petraeus’ counterinsurgency identified and paid local Sunni tribal leaders to bring Iraq back to normalcy but then al-Maliki’s Shiite Baghdad destroyed all that good work and made impossible to reconcile the various tribes to unite again because there is no trust nor vision of nationhood. And in Syria Bashar al-Assad has lost control of so much that I consider it balkanized already. I think that Iran can feel secure with a balkanized middle east, especially those parts on its border. So let it happen. Of all the players in the region it’s the Kurds who have a strong will for nationhood. We should support their effort for nationhood because they pacify regions with a functioning politic that polices and administers well.
Charlie: And the rest of Iraq and Syria?
Vincent: Nothing we can do. Iran will take care of Shiite Iraq and Alawite Syria. The recent clearing out of ISIS in Sunni cities of Syria and Iraq breaks the alliances that were formed to take out the common enemy and leaves these areas at a point of great and indeterminate turmoil where the U.S. has no influence and Iran will only aggravate if they try to overreach and quell Sunni rebels. I could see Turkey annexing part of Syria from the North and Jordan from the South. Bashar will cry that he has been invaded but who cares?
Charlie: You are suggesting Turkey and Jordan invade Syria?
Vincent: Well, they are functioning politics that are more likely to pacify Sunni Rebels than any other scenario. But who am I to suggest.
Charlie: And what about our alliance with Saudi Arabia?
Vincent: Please please don’t get me started. Well okay let’s start with the Shah of Iran. Back in the 70’s I remember President Carter speaking of the Shah of Iran as the linchpin of security in the Middle East. He was King, he was authoritarian and he promised security. No need for our CIA to investigate anything independently, the Shah was in charge and would provide the complete picture. That’s the way it is today with Saudi Arabia and their proxy in Egypt's General Sisi. It’s apparent all our CIA analysis has a Saudi slant to it. Your interviews, for example, with Mike Morrell show a Sunni bias which I believe permeates our intelligence community. I say it’s like the Shah of Iran because the Saudi Kingdom is about to implode now that the last of Saud’s sons, the youngest, has named one of his sons to be next in line among a thousand prince pretenders, many the sons of the forty older more illustrious predecessors to the current King. In the near future we may have a Sunni Kingdom and their proxies against us along with a huge arsenal of our weapons. In the meantime this ally showing our establishment the way in the Middle East is proving to be highly irrational and chaotic. Its to the point that we should prefer an enemy we understand to a friend pursuing an emotional religious vendetta.
Charlie: So do what?
Vincent: Stop taking sides in the Sunni Shiite divide in Islam and disengage with Saudi Arabia before it’s done for us by regime change.
Charlie: Anywhere else we should apply Realpolitik as you understand it?
Vincent: Well, yes back to China where Realpolitik was first applied by Nixon and Kissinger. It seems to me that unilateral engagement with North Korea is pointless. A distant hegemonic power such as ours doesn’t do well when trying to influence a client of China, the local hegemon. The Kid playing nuclear matchsticks is China’s existential threat, not ours. It’s our job to show China their real threat and use our real lever of power, denial of the One China understanding that came with the opening of China to make them understand they have to take out The Kid. Frankly for all of its authoritarianism it’s difficult to understand how they could have let loose such a dangerous and independent outlier. Xi Jinping’s authority comes from the economic progress he promises for China but The Kid puts that progress in jeopardy with the threat of a possible nuclear exchange right in the heart of the tech logistics chain, best described by Tom Friedman in his book The World is Flat, that fuels it. Tom Cook at Apple has got to look at the risk and tell Foxconn, the Taiwanese subcontractor, that they need another assembly chain away from a possible holocaust zone. Hopefully it brings tech manufacturing back to the U.S., but not necessarily. What is necessary though is an independent Taiwan that could transplant the Southeast Asia logistics machine elsewhere, India for example, which under One China would be difficult. Another curiosity is how China’s military is growing yet without a clear vision of what it is for. It shouldn’t be for harassing Japan, South Korea and Vietnam but for securing the logistics chain their economy is so dependent on. For China to have a temper tantrum with South Korea over U.S. deployed THAAD missiles is ludicrous. South Korea's Samsung provides 35% of the value of an IPhone assembled in China, what does North Korea contribute? China does not recognize who its real enemy is and its Realpolitik to educate them.
Charlie: And what’s Libertarian about Realpolitik?
Vincent: Hubris. Take away the the conceit that we know best and can manage from the top down. Primarily it’s a State Department that takes the Hippocratic Oath of “first do no harm.” Why? Because foreign affairs is at the level of medicine hundreds years ago where bloodletting was thought to be a good prescription. Understand that our levers of power are few and weak and only effective against other hegemonic powers. Military power has to be credible to keep hegemons in check but best not used, certainly not for ephemeral issues mentioned in State’s daily briefings. Briefings which force State to take positions without solutions which then make them consider the military option because it's available. We need a State Department that believes we are without the military option when dealing with less than hegemons.
Charlie: And so with Russia?
Vincent: Exactly, resist hegemonic expansion in the Ukraine in support of Europe is Realpolitik in action.
Charlie: And President Trump’s embrace of Putin?
Vincent: He is such an unthinking blowhard that doesn’t realize how he steps on his own argument, sometime in the same sentence, that there is no need to understand what he says or does. It baffles me that media bothers to attend a Sarah Huckabee Sanders briefing. I have taken solace on one thing about Trump, which is he gives progressives a great reason to reject one size fits all solutions and embrace Federalism.
Charlie: How so?
Vincent: When FDR tried solving The Great Depression with the New Deal he used central government control over our Constitution’s federalism. While the New Deal wasn’t convincing the successful prosecution of World War II gave big central government control a patina of goodness and competence on which it has been riding for decades. But the assumption was that the levers of power would always be managed by good and competent people. Trump has shown what a nightmare it can be when you hand those levers over to the Devil. The split in the United States is between urban and rural. Federalism provides a framework under which urban groups can develop and fund programs to further their needs and leave rural areas, where those policies won’t work, alone.
Charlie: And you feel good about that?
Vincent: Yes, we have a Man Who Would Be King up against our Constitution that can ignore him because it has this framework of distributed power power that so perfectly adapts to a World is Flat hierarchy.
Charlie: On that note we have to leave because of time.
Vincent: Thank you Charlie.
No comments:
Post a Comment