Zakaria’s Lament

I’m not sure what the point of Fareed Zakaria’s latest Washington Post column is other than that he doesn’t like Trump. Let’s start here:

This week, talks between Washington and Seoul broke down after the Trump administration demanded a 400 percent increase in what South Korea pays for the stationing of U.S. troops in that country. The annual operating cost of the U.S. military presence there is approximately $2 billion. Seoul pays a little less than half that. Trump is asking for $4.7 billion.

I think that Trump’s asking South Korea to pay more than the cost of our maintaining troops in South Korea was dumb. Presumably, he thought he was at the beginning of a negotiation rather than in the middle of one in which the price had already been established (less than half the cost) and he didn’t know what the insult price was. Blowing up the talks with the increase was outrageous but thinking that South Korea should be paying more isn’t. We should have a plan for increasing South Korea’s tithe until it’s at least the full cost. South Korea isn’t a poor, broken down country. It’s one of the most prosperous countries in Asia and, indeed, a competitor. Signalling to them that under the circumstances they should be carrying more of the freight isn’t that bad an idea.

Or this:

Trump’s impulse everywhere is to quit the field. He has done so in the Middle East, ceding U.S. foreign policy to his favorite strongmen, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The American withdrawal from northern Syria has handed over a large swath of the country to Turkey and bolstered Russia, Iran and the Bashar al-Assad regime. When Republican senators complained about the abandonment of the Syrian Kurds, who lost 10,000 troops supporting the U.S.-led fight against the Islamic State, Trump’s response was to let Erdogan show them a propaganda video claiming that our allies were actually terrorists.

I don’t honestly know what “Trump’s impulse” is. I’ve said repeatedly that I don’t understand the man. IMO Mr. Zakaria is misstating what actually happened. Were the Kurds “supporting the U.S.-led fight against the Islamic State” or were they defending their homeland? What’s the U. S. interest in Syria? I don’t think that establishing Kurdish homeland there is and, presumably, neither do the Turks. I also think that Erdogan’s Turkey is a major problem but, again, what’s the U.S. interest?

The Trump administration has also given up on support for broad-based norms and values. It withdrew from the U.N. Human Rights Council, ceding the field to countries such as China and Saudi Arabia. The American Civil Liberties Union has charged that the Trump administration has ended all cooperation with international human rights monitors in the United States. Trump’s tariffs have rocked the free-trade system, perhaps irretrievably. This week, the administration reversed the long-standing U.S. position that Israeli settlements violate international law.

IMO Mr. Zakaria should look at the membership of the UNHCR, present and past. It has included and presently includes members who are not signatories to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I’m not sure how much value there is in being a member of a committee that can’t even agree on what human rights are. That’s a persistent misconception of internationalists. There is no global consensus on human rights. In the absence of such a consensus anything else is just wishful thinking.

There’s a lot in the column about what Mr. Zakaria is against but next to nothing about what he’s for. I have some questions for him.

1. Why was replacing the Assad regime either with Al Qaeda or DAESH in the U.S. interest? Those were the only alternatives. There were no liberal democrats waiting in the wings to take over.
2. The concept behind the system of “forward deployments” put in place in the decade following World War II was that we would provide security from the surplus we realized as being the only major industrial economy left intact by the war. China is now capturing that surplus. The circumstances have changed. Why doesn’t it make sense for the arrangement to change?
3. Kemalist Turkey was the country that joined NATO. Why is Islamist Turkey still a NATO member?
4. Finally, why is invading one country after another internationalist while avoiding such invasions is isolationist?