Primer on Foreign Relations

I think that these paragraphs in a post by Matthew Blood on negotiations between Putin and Trump at Small Wars Journal form a pretty good primer international relations:

At its most basic level, diplomacy is about employing the tools of statecraft to achieve desirable objectives usually called “national interests” – things that advance the security of the United States and its allies. The national interests of the world’s leading global superpower are numerous and broad, and different interests can and do regularly conflict with one another in any given situation, necessitating hard choices about strategic priorities and unavoidable tradeoffs.

Relationships with other countries, whether allied or hostile, are a means to achieving objectives that advance American interests. Those relationships have no moral content in their own right, only utility toward the realization of larger purposes. A personal friendship with the leader of an adversarial country waging a war of aggression in Europe that has killed 10,000 people to date means little if it fails to influence that country’s behavior in the war.[11]

The United States ultimately has only the most limited influence over whether or not a given country adopts an a priori posture supportive or hostile to core U.S. interests like the integrity of American elections or the prohibition on the seizure of other countries’ land and resources by military force. The specific American national interests at stake in the contested U.S. relationship with Russia are myriad and wide-ranging, and Trump variously mentioned a number of them both before and during his summit with Putin while conspicuously overlooking others.

It seems to me that there are multiple aspects of gaining such influence. There’s the well known “carrots and sticks”, for example. Neither tend to be very effective when dealing with a major power. Might that be because they have interests of their own? When you have failed over a period of years to gain any influence and, indeed, have increased hostility might stopping your pursuit of goals inimical to the interests of your interlocutor be worth a try when doing so does not harm your own interests?

Mr. Blood does not think that the prospects for negotiations between Trump and Putin are very bright:

If diplomacy was as easy as President Trump seems to assume, dangerous disagreements between the United States and Russia or China or Iran or North Korea would have been resolved long ago. Hard cases persist because they are hard. Actual national interests almost universally matter more than personal relationships in contested bilateral relations between countries.

and

Famously ignorant of history and policy, President Trump likely fails to grasp the wider strategic implications of his own improvised diplomacy of “getting along.” To take just one example, consider China’s construction of artificial island military bases in the South China Sea, which amply demonstrates its eagerness to use force in the resolution of its numerous other territorial disputes with neighbors like Taiwan as China rises to global superpower status.

In the current context, establishing a “good relationship” with Russia as American interests around the world remain under attack from an ongoing Russian campaign of hybrid warfare is flatly damaging to U.S. national security interests. Both the Bush II and Obama administrations eventually reverted to strategies aimed at punishing and deterring Russian aggression.

He includes a bill of indictment against President Putin and Russia:

They did so, for instance, before Putin rigged Russia’s 2011 elections;[18] invaded Ukraine; annexed Crimea; shot down the civilian airliner Malaysia Airlines MH17 with nearly 300 international passengers on board; gunned down Russia’s most important democratic opposition leader, Boris Nemtsov, just outside the Kremlin; launched a military campaign in partnership with Iran to shore up the murderous Syrian dictatorship; flattened Syrian cities with Russian airpower; attacked an American military base in Syria with Russian mercenaries;[19] deployed chemical weapons in assassinations on British soil; supplied arms and cash to the Taliban to kill American and Afghan soldiers and civilians;[20] carried out attempted coups in Montenegro[21] and Serbia;[22] and launched wide-ranging covert actions and information warfare operations targeting democratic elections in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and elsewhere across Europe.[23] The list could go on.

and, indeed, it sounds pretty damning.

I do have a question for Mr. Blood. Over the period of the last 25 years how would a United States committed to a “rules-based, liberal world order” have behaved? Differently, no differently?