I think that Walter Russell Mead’s latest Wall Street Journal column is one of his best. It is primarily a critique of the Biden Administration’s Middle East policy. After cataloguing the administration’s many failed overtures, he arrives here:
Mr. Biden has fundamentally misjudged what diplomacy is and what it can and can’t do. As a man who came of age politically during the Vietnam War and was politically and personally scarred by his support for the Iraq war, the president knows in his bones that military power projection unrelated to an achievable political goal often leads to expensive disasters.
He isn’t wrong about this, but like many in the Democratic policy world, Mr. Biden rejected a misguided overconfidence in military force only to attribute similar magic powers to diplomacy. Diplomacy in quest of an unachievable political goal is as misguided as poorly conceived military adventurism and can ultimately be as costly.
However, I think he errs here:
In the 1930s, the U.S. thought Japan’s attempt to conquer China was both immoral and bad for American interests, but a mix of naive pacifism and blind isolationism blocked any serious response. Instead, Washington settled on a diplomatic stance of nonresistance to Japanese aggression mixed with nonrecognition of Japanese conquests and claims. The policy failed to help China. What it accomplished was to persuade a critical mass of Japanese leaders that America was irredeemably decadent. They gradually came to believe that a nation so foolishly led would respond to the destruction of its Pacific fleet with diplomats rather than aircraft carriers.
Japan invaded China (Manchuria) in September 1931. I honestly don’t know if Americans considered the invasion immoral. What I have read does not reflect that. I suspect that American missionaries in China did but that is not synonymous with Americans. What is unclear to me is whether Americans saw that as damaging to American interests or were largely disinterested. I suspect the latter. Smoot-Hawley had been enacted the year before and what little trade we had with China had been sharply curtailed. IMO during the 1930s Americans were more concerned about survival.
The second Sino-Japanese War began in 1937. I think that Japanese atrocities during that war aroused some humanitarian concerns in the United States. Lend-Lease, considerably more expansive than our support for Britain and France, began in 1941, in significant part a response to those concerns. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor was at the end of 1941 and it was a “Hail Mary”on Japan’s part, intended to prevent active U. S. participation in war in the Pacific and at least some Japanese leaders understood that at the time. Note that I do not sympathize with the Japanese. I do think they held a very bad hand and they gambled and lost.
I think that Dr. Mead is not particularly well-informed on pre-WWII U. S.-China bilateral trade. I suspect he’s imposing neoliberal ideas on the 1930s. I also suspect that racism played a role in the U. S. response to Japan’s invading Manchuria and then China proper. I haven’t studied the matter in detail but I think it’s a reasonable presumption.
Dr. Mead continues:
Allies as well as adversaries increasingly disregard American wishes and discount its warnings.
That isn’t good for American interests, and it won’t bring peace to the region. As events slide out of control, Mr. Biden’s diplomats can do little more than wring their hands and wish for better times. The failure isn’t their fault. Like soldiers sent into a war their leaders don’t know how to win, America’s diplomats were tasked with an impossible mission their leader never thought through.
I think that Dr. Mead has the diagnosis wrong here. American prestige due completely to
- American economic might and
- American military might
with the latter being downstream from the former. We have had multiple military failures since 2001 including
- the attack on 9/11
- invasion and occupation of Afghanistan
- invasion and occupation of Iraq
and how do you characterize actions like removing Qaddafi in Libya? Or supporting Saudi Arabia in its war with Yemen? Were those moral and in our national interest?
I don’t honestly see how the U. S. can retain military and economic preeminence while deindustrializing and reducing our military budget. And that doesn’t even get into the “magical thinking on diplomacy” theme that is Dr. Mead’s main topic.
I’m not sure I see the Biden Administration’s problem as “magical thinking” so much as the strategy it, apparently, learned from the Obama Administration: preconceding what your interlocutor actually wanted. I do not understand the reasoning behind that. The other party will be so grateful it will do what you want in exchange? Now that’s magical thinking.
So you think Putin wanted Biden to support Ukraine? That’s a bizarre claim. Anyway, this whole prestige thing is mostly nonsense. As you note it’s about our money and our military. No one else is able to conduct war away from their backyard, logistics and capabilities, as well as the US. As we have seen Russia cant even conduct a war well in its backyard.
Most of the prestige complaints really come down to we didnt do things they way the critic wanted so we must be less prestigious. We should largely ignore those. Fact is I am not sure if we have really been able to stop a war somewhere else at anytime in our history. The vast majority of our engagements are in other countries and usually without a useful/realistic endpoint or goal ahead of time. We set a very limited goal in Desert Storm and got out. Not so much in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Steve
The US had army and naval forces operating in China from at least as early as 1920 through the outbreak of our WW II in 1941. They were there to maintain the Open Door policy, which was essentially a colonial project to protect American commercial interests. The various western European powers also had forces in China and actual colonies, eg Hong Kong, Macao. China submitted, but did not like it. The movie “The Sand Pebbles” nicely catches the era.
Of course, that was America in its ascendancy. Current America has barely enough industrial capacity and human resources to maintain its current military. It has no capacity to expand that military nor to replace losses if war breaks out. The readers and writers of Elite rags like the WSJ, NYT, and WaPo don ‘t understand those facts, and they merrily plot wars with Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, even while Somalia, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen are ongoing and being lost.
Do Meade and VDH know that the Houthis control the Red Sea?
Where did I say that?
Dr. Mead’s column is about the Middle East. He doesn’t mention Ukraine and neither do I.
and it’s possible to connect the dots between Desert Storm and the attack on 9/11.
Bob:
The commercial interests of the Open Door policy were largely access to Chinese markets rather than purchases from China and there was not a tremendous amount of that. IMO the Open Door policy was just the U. S. trying to play with the big kids.
You said that Obama always do what their opponents would want them to do. I am having a hard time thinking of an example so it must be something like that.
Steve
I remember him releasing sanctioned money to fund Hezbollah thru Iran.
I remember him looking like he was watching a good game of tennis when he read speeches.
I remember him diverting NASA’s budget and mission to Islamic outreach.
Now that’s a chess player!