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“Interagency Consensus” DIME Not Worth a Plugged Nickel on NATO
Everyone in the vaunted “interagency,” is well aware of the concept of the instruments of national power. The old Army War College acronym is “DIME,” for diplomatic, informational, military, and economic tools. You will notice that each tends to rest primarily in different departments, different agencies in the “interagency.” This would be why you need multiple agencies to coordinate rather than always operating “in their own lane.”
Just as Madison Avenue is best at selling Madison Avenue, so too the permanent bureaucracy and its affiliates, allies, patrons, and petitioners all affirm competent and selfless expertise in the face of all evidence. Indeed, the reverence for the “foreign policy consensus” evokes the British Parliament’s ritual prostration before the NHS. Thank God that we finally have a president who feels no such compulsion, the first such since Ronald Reagan.
H.R. McMasters showed real professionalism in his honchoing of President Trump’s National Security Strategy. He actually ensured the “interagency” worked to produce a coordinated draft that conformed to the Commander in Chief’s clear intent, where “ commander’s intent” is a military term of art for guidance that must be fully supported. This baseline document was actually published within the first year of President Trump’s administration.
What has apparently been a great surprise to the Deep State is that this president actually meant what he published. There has been no turning on the primacy of our economic tools of national power, both in the trade and energy sectors. President Trump helps American workers, and businesses, and the energy consumers of the world, by opening the natural gas and oil “pipelines” wide, flooding the world market.
This week, while the media tells you, if at all, about NATO’s 70th anniversary, the real story is Germany and Russia back to their bad old ways. Once again, a German leader is conniving with a Russian leader to do a deal of mutual benefit, at the expense of the states unlucky to be situated in between them.
The German leader wants uninterrupted natural gas from Russia, not America, and does not want to be vulnerable to Putin’s next pipeline power play in Ukraine. Putin turns off the gas when he wants to punish a non-compliant Ukrainian people. Now, with a bilateral agreement, opposed by others including the United States, Nord Stream 2 will follow the sea bed from Russia to Germany, parallel to Nord Stream 1, doubling capacity.
This is the same Germany, and the same German leader, showing complete contempt for NATO and the United States, as it spends only half the mutually agreed target of two percent GDP on its own national defense. The once powerful, well equipped, and competent German military is a pathetic joke. Oh, they can muster the sort of special forces that have long been needed to deal with terrorists, from back in the 1970s when communist gangs were serious business. But the navy, and the formerly greatest tank force in the world? Jokes, very sad jokes.
The American foreign policy establishment’s answer has been to talk around and paper over reality. President Trump, like President Reagan, is having none of this. As he prepared to fly to London, Secretary of State Pompeo was hammering away on the latest numbers, showing that NATO countries had finally come around to actual increases in their own defense spending. This reality, although markedly uneven, conveys good messages to Putin, to the American people, and to the people of Europe, who have finally heard from their leaders that their nations are worth spending at least a small slice of the economic pie on national security.
The countries to the west of Russia, as a whole, dwarf the Russian economy. Indeed, Texas is bigger than the Russian economy. While it is true that Putin can spend a much higher percentage on military equipment and personnel, without losing political power, the sheer difference in scale of economies creates the potential for the rest of Europe to shut down any Russian dream of renewed empire in the west. And, as long as Donald J. Trump is president of the United States, the price of natural gas and crude oil has an upper limit, throttling Russian ambitions.
The use of economic and informational tools, along with some diplomacy, is far wiser than talk of armed confrontation between the only two countries in the world capable of rendering each other smoldering ruins in mere hours. I laid this out back in July of 2018, in “Loose Cannons and Nuclear Buttons: Dealing with Russia.” I quoted the relevant portions of President Trump’s NSS, with some explanation. Looking back, President Trump’s strategy has not changed and he is succeeding within the limits of European politics and U.S. constitutional powers.
Published in Foreign Policy
I get the pose, but believe reality to be different.
How does one “normalize” relations with a country that is ruled, entirely, outside of what we might call “cities”, by warlords?
Not sure there would have been an appropriate Algonquin Roundtable big enough to warehouse all those rational Afghani thinkers you seem to think Bush overlooked in his rush to throw away American lives.
Oh, and a friend of mine is convinced the earth is flat, and thinks Bon Jovi really rocks.
And to echo others’ comments, on nation-building, you can lead horses to water, etc. One wonders why a country so rich in oil deposits can’t build its own electrical grid, but one also wonders why, these many years later, one should care.
Iraq was done in by Bush’s incompetence. We allowed them to form a government too soon. We did not have a large enough army to occupy so large a country. We allowed Iran to meddle in their politics.
Had we used a larger army, had we been less concerned with civilian casualties, had we been less afraid to hurt anyone or anything, the people would have continued to welcome us and would have turned over all those that started to make trouble. Since we were spread so thinly, when insurgents started to get active, the people were rightly afraid that we couldn’t protect them. Since we couldn’t protect them, the people knew they would be killed if they publicly supported us.
The Iraqi people are civilized and generally educated. Unlike Afghanistan where the people are living a primitive, Stone Age existence, the Iraqis had businesses, wanted to keep their children in school, thought that their school system and testing were of utmost importance, and wanted to be safe and have peace. We failed to give them peace because George Bush is a fool. He squandered a fantastic opportunity to make an ally and bringing peace to that country because he gave them self-governance before they had stability.
We could have done it. Bush screwed it up. The Iraqi people should be cursing his name for generations. Freedom was so close, but he allowed the religious fanatics to step in and take charge.
I’ll buy all of that. You’re also assuming that Bush could have politically been able to build and maintain a large occupying force to bring the stability that *might* have allowed for a modern, mature Iraq to emerge. This also assumes that if Bush weren’t the incompetent failure you paint him as (and I’m not necessarily disagreeing), Iraq would have emerged in a magical existence of the well educated and business-lovin’ Freedom Iraqis ™ that history demonstrates have dominated the region since time immemorial.
Maybe. But it’s their country. Did they want that future? What did they do to secure it for themselves? What are they doing today to change their future?
I don’t know the answers to those questions. I just don’t like the idea of everything being one guy’s fault, ignoring thousands of years of history, and assuming one man owns everything, when there’s a Congress, elections, and a budget.
Exactly. He was a terrible politician.
I don’t have much tolerance for someone who takes on a task without having the resources to do it right.
I believe it could have been done right. Here are the important points that Bush screwed up:
Most of the Iraqis I met were decent people who just wanted to live in peace. Bush’s policies assured that they couldn’t.