How To Tell the Birds from the Flowers

In an interesting essay at the Wall Street Journal Walter Russell Mead summarizes the present U. S. foreign policy situation:

Five distinct threats will compete for John Bolton’s attention as he settles into Henry Kissinger’s old digs: First, North Korea’s drive toward nuclear weapons that threaten the U.S. has reached a critical juncture. Second, China’s militarization of the South China Sea coincides with a crisis in U.S.-China trade relations. Third, Russia’s efforts to disrupt the Western alliance system and re-establish itself as a major power in the Middle East have progressed to the point that not even Donald Trump can ignore them. Fourth, Iran’s push to consolidate its gains in Syria and Lebanon has alarmed and provoked Israel and its once-hostile Arab neighbors. Fifth, Islamist terrorism continues to lurk in the shadows, threatening to emerge at any moment and force Western governments to respond.

As the White House considers these threats, its options are constrained. Seventeen years of indecisive war has left a polarized American public weary of global engagement. The midterm elections may yield a “blue wave” that forces the president into a defensive crouch to fend off investigations and perhaps even impeachment by a Democratic Congress. The press is deeply hostile to the Trump administration and unwilling to grant it the benefit of the doubt in foreign policy. Traditional alliances are strained: Europe and Asia worry that an “America First” administration is less valuable and reliable as a partner; Turkey, meanwhile, flirts with a revisionist confederation with Russia and Iran.

Compounding the challenge is that adversaries world-wide share an interest in keeping Uncle Sam off-balance. North Korea, China, Russia, Iran and the jihadists don’t operate on a single master plan, but this common interest leads to a kind of informal coordination. Crises may erupt at inconvenient times for the U.S. precisely because they are inconvenient times for the U.S.

I’m not sure those are actually our gravest foreign policy problems. I think that I would say that the most important issues are:

• We’re waging too many wars of dubious national security value.
• China’s persistent flouting of international rules.
• Largescale migrations of populations from Central and South America, Africa, and Asia are producing social upheaval here, in Europe, and, increasingly, in Africa and South America.
• The alliances we’ve sustained since the end of World War II are running out of gas. Turkey is no longer an ally. Is Germany our ally or our enemy? How about Israel?
• The Middle East is entering a period of sharply declining economic fortunes.
• We need to come to a modus vivendi with Russia.

I think that John Bolton is uniquely ill-suited to offer sound advice on those issues but maybe it’s just me.