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Syria, Russia, and Trump
I’m not sure how much news about Aleppo is filtering through the non-stop election coverage. Although my sense was that Gary Johnson did, indeed, know what Aleppo was (and just flubbed the question through some kind of inattention), that kind of inattention is only possible if the subject just isn’t something you think about all that much.
I don’t know whether he’s typical of American voters. It’s not something the next president will be able to ignore, though, that’s for sure. Aleppo’s now a hellscape reminiscent of the Battle of Stalingrad. Even by the horrifying standards of the Syrian war, the past week’s events Aleppo represent a new level of depravity. Russian and Syrian government airstrikes killed more than 300 people, most of them civilians and many of them children; more than 250,000 civilians are trapped. They’re under attack by the Syrian military and by thousands of foreign militiamen commanded by Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Hezbollah fighters, and Russian ground troops; and they’re under bombardment by heavy Russian and Syrian air power — the most sustained and intense bombardment since the beginning of the war. A genuine Axis of Evil, if anything ever was, has emerged from this. Most of the civilians are, according to the Violations Documentation Center in Syria, being killed by Russians. I don’t know how reliable they are, so take this with the usual caveats:
Meanwhile, Putin has formally resurrected the KGB itself:
According to the Russian daily Kommersant, a major new reshuffle of Russia’s security agencies is under way that will unite the FSB (the main successor agency to the KGB) with Russia’s foreign intelligence service into a new super-agency called the Ministry of State Security — a report that, significantly, wasn’t denied by the Kremlin or the FSB itself.
The new agency, which revives the name of Stalin’s secret police between 1943 and 1953, will be as large and powerful as the old Soviet KGB, employing as many as 250,000 people.
The creation of the new Ministry of State Security represents a “victory for the party of the Chekists,” said Moscow security analyst Tatyana Stanovaya, referring to the first Bolshevik secret police. The important difference is that, at its core, the reshuffle marks Putin’s asserting his own personal authority over Russia’s security apparatus. …
“On the night of September 18 to 19 … the country went from authoritarian to totalitarian,” wrote former liberal Duma deputy Gennady Gudkov on his Facebook page.
And the Ukrainian military is reporting the heaviest day of fighting since the latest attempt at a ceasefire came into effect on September 15.
Richard Cohen at the Washington Post, not exactly known as a Trump booster, is absolutely scathing about the Administration’s role in this:
This is not Kerry’s failure. It is Obama’s. He takes overweening pride in being the anti-George W. Bush. Obama is the president who did not get us into any nonessential wars of the Iraq variety. The consequences for Syria have been dire — perhaps 500,000 dead, 7 million internal refugees, with millions more surging toward Europe like a tsunami of the desperate.
European politics has been upended — Germany’s Angela Merkel is in trouble, Britain has bolted from the European Union, and Hungary and Poland are embracing their shameful pasts — but there is yet another casualty of this war, the once-universal perception that the United States would never abide the slaughter of innocents on this scale. Yet, we have. Obama has proclaimed doing nothing as doing something — lives saved, a quagmire avoided. But doing nothing is not nothing. It is a policy of its own, in this case allowing the creation of a true axis of evil: a gleeful, high-kicking chorus line of Russia, Iran and Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. They stomp on everything in their path.
Aleppo then is like Guernica, a place of carnage. It’s also a symbol of American weakness. The same Putin who mucks around in Syria has filched U.S. emails and barged into the U.S. election. He has kept Crimea and a hunk of Ukraine and may decide tomorrow that the Baltics, once Soviet, need liberating from liberation. He long ago sized up Obama: all brain, no muscle.
All over the world, U.S. power is dismissed. The Philippine president, a volcanic vulgarian, called the president a “son of a whore” and, instead of doing an update of sending in the fleet, Obama canceled a meeting. China constructs synthetic islands in the Pacific Ocean, claiming shipping lanes that no one should own, and every once in a while a U.S. warship cruises close — but not too close. We pretend to have made a point. The Chinese wave and continue building. The North Koreans are developing a nuclear missile to reach Rodeo Drive, and God only knows what the Iranians are up to deep in their tunnels.
Does all this stem from Uncle Sam’s bended knee in Syria? Who knows? But U.S. reluctance to act has almost certainly given others resolve.
A question for those of you who plan to vote for Donald Trump. Your logic (I assume) is that Hillary Clinton is associated with Obama’s disastrous foreign policy, and should pay the price for this at the ballot box. If this were a normal election, who could disagree? But don’t you think that it isn’t a normal election? Unlike hapless Gary Johnson, Donald Trump almost certainly has no idea what Aleppo is, and he’s shown no desire or ability to learn. You saw it: He arrived at the debate as unprepared to discuss foreign policy as he was at the start of his campaign. And to the extent he has any coherent policy, it’s explicitly to make the Obama Administration’s foreign policy look interventionist by comparison.
Vladimir Putin not only supports Trump, but is almost certainly actively interfering with an American election with the aim of ushering him into office. Trump, as we saw in the debate, either doesn’t know this, or denies it, or doesn’t even understand what the relevant words mean:
As far as the cyber, I agree to parts of what Secretary Clinton said. We should be better than anybody else, and perhaps we’re not. I don’t think anybody knows it was Russia that broke into the DNC. She’s saying Russia, Russia, Russia, but I don’t — maybe it was. I mean, it could be Russia, but it could also be China. It could also be lots of other people. It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, okay?
You don’t know who broke in to DNC.
But what did we learn with DNC? We learned that Bernie Sanders was taken advantage of by your people, by Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Look what happened to her. But Bernie Sanders was taken advantage of. That’s what we learned.
Now, whether that was Russia, whether that was China, whether it was another country, we don’t know, because the truth is, under President Obama we’ve lost control of things that we used to have control over.
We came in with the Internet, we came up with the Internet, and I think Secretary Clinton and myself would agree very much, when you look at what [the Islamic State] is doing with the Internet, they’re beating us at our own game. ISIS.
So we have to get very, very tough on cyber and cyber warfare. It is — it is a huge problem. I have a son. He’s 10 years old. He has computers. He is so good with these computers, it’s unbelievable. The security aspect of cyber is very, very tough. And maybe it’s hardly doable.
Did that garbled speech make Trump-supporters here hesitate at all? “I have a son. He’s 10 years old. He has computers?” We all know elderly, disoriented people who talk like that. In my experience people who talk like that can’t understand these things — it’s not that they don’t want to, it’s that they don’t have the cognitive ability. How could Donald Trump possibly understand what people tell him about Russia and Syria, even if he did surround himself with “the best” advisors?
Do you see any sign that “the best” advisors are helping him to understand what he’d confront from his first minute in office? If so, what sign do you see that I don’t?
Published in General
Syrians are the majority or largest plurality of total refugees in a lot of Europe. Of the about 3 million of all origins in Germany, the majority are male. How many are Syrians, IDK but:
The 2010 population of Syria was less than 24 million. Median age around 21. About 7 million males from 15-64, so probably 3 million or more of military age. Current Syrian Army about 100,ooo and maybe that many again in the various opposition groups and IS.
About 3 million people have fled Syria, I think. It sounds as though the men have tended to head for Europe. Guesstimating about 10-20% of military age Syrian men are in Europe with Germany a top destination.
Claire,
There’s so much to address. This is a great post, since it asks difficult questions about one of the major candidates.
First, in answer to your question, foreign policy has been the area where Trump concerns me the most. After almost 8 years of O, I want a president who will appreciate our allies. On the other hand, Hillary has experience and an appreciation for our allies (even though I don’t think she’ll necessarily do the right thing, Libya being the most obvious example of this). Having over 20 years of service overseas with our allies, it’s a big jump for me to support him.
I’m giving Trump the benefit of the doubt because a campaign is a full-time job, and his learning curve is very steep. I also believe that, as President, once he gets the full intel briefing on what Putin is really doing, he’ll do a 180.
A question to you: In comment #69, you said that the election of Trump would cause immediate global instability on a scale we’re unprepared for. Can you give any examples of what you envision? Are you thinking about Russian and Chinese military actions to solidify their gains or grab more? Or do you see stock market crashes?
Russian military action to solidify and grab, certainly. I’m not in much doubt that Putin has interpreted Trump’s comments as a green light. Putin may be wrong, but that kind of misunderstanding is exactly how wars break out. Right now our deterrence power in Europe and particularly in the Baltics is much more psychological than material. If Trump were elected, that would vanish.
I don’t have as strong an instinct about what China would do. They might be cautious enough to wait and see how things go for Russia. Iran will also try to “solidify and grab.” I would guess weaker allies in Asia will hedge their bets on American staying power and try to get closer to China. Britain and Germany will do the same; they’re too heavily invested in Asia not to.
If the Trump administration refuses to make clear which defense commitments it will honor and which it won’t, allied governments won’t have domestic support to spend the money and accept the risks they need to take to hold up their own end, militarily. The only way any small European country can stand up to Russia is through collective security; if that’s undermined, resistance is no longer rational.
Markets will immediately tank on the uncertainty if he’s elected, I figure, but might rally and stabilize if he doesn’t do anything to spook them right away. If he starts saying crazy things in office, though, or slapping massive tariffs on trade partners and ripping up trade agreements — or if he says another word about “restructuring” US debt — there will be global panic, and it will be near-impossible to restore market confidence. Withdrawal from trade agreements doesn’t require congressional approval. If he effectuates even half the tariffs he’s threatened, there will be well-founded fear of the worst trade war since the Great Depression. The dollar would tank, which would boost exports, but nowhere near enough to compensate for the damage, I reckon, and that would undermine the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency — it will, at least, sharply accelerate the search for alternatives.
Just the sheer amount of uncertainty he brings with him is bad for business confidence. Even if starting on Day 1 we see another Trump, one who’s consistent and sensible, it will take investors a long time to recover from the impression he’s created during the campaign and trust that the US is going to act in a steady way.
If he starts banning Muslims (who knows if he’d really do that) I can envision reciprocal travel bans around the world against US citizens — a lot of countries would be under heavy domestic pressure to do that. US companies operating abroad would obviously be gravely harmed by that. Something tells me that’s one of the promises he has no intention of carrying out. But I can’t be sure. If he were to alienate Muslim allies like that, we’d quickly see diminished counter-terrorism cooperation. Right now we have robust intelligence-sharing from Morocco to Indonesia; to some extent that will continue because it’s in their interests, too, but these arrangements are based on human relationships, and those will suffer — especially because countries like that will have reason to doubt that we’ll hold up our side of established trade and security agreements, and they’ll be under massive popular pressure to vitiate their relationships with us. But my instinct is that he won’t follow through on that promise, so I’m less worried about that. I’m much more worried about Russia, because Putin so clearly believes Trump is his man, about how US allies in Asia will respond if they think we’re not reliable, and about the rest of the world’s nuts who would see his election as a sign that the US just doesn’t care who invades or annexes who.
If I were a Japanese or South Korean defense planner, I’d be waiting for a very affirmative statement of support for US security guarantees from Trump, and if I didn’t hear it, I’d accelerate plans for an independent nuclear deterrent — there would be popular support for this in both countries, if Trump in office seemed hesitant about US guarantees or uncomprehending of the threats they face. I’m also worried about the Indo-Pak crisis — would a Trump Administration have any ability to influence either side?
The biggest risk comes from the way he’d handle an unexpected crisis, whether from China, Russia, North Korea, a cyberattack, terrorism, or something else. We’ve seen that he has a hard time restraining himself when provoked, and I’m sure the better intelligence departments of adversarial powers have studied with interest the degree to which he can be thrown off track and distracted by insults to his vanity, or made sweet by compliments and flattery. I could see him responding to a crisis with bravado, threats of escalation, and words he can’t back up — or worse, words he can, but shouldn’t. I can also see him falling for a false-flag attack: He has strong instincts about events and doesn’t wait for the information to come in before deciding what they mean.
I think we’ve seen, over the past eight years, what happens when the United States becomes a diminished global presence. To some extent, this is not under the control of the president; the postwar US controlled 50 percent of the world economy; the figure is now about 16 percent; we’re not as powerful as we once were and no president can change that. But it’s always been true, or it’s been true at least since the dawn of the nuclear era, that much of our power devolved from our ability to convince the world that we intended to stand by security guarantees, even if in fact we’d have been nuts to stand by them, and even if in reality no one would have survived our “standing by them.” It’s always been true that if people suspected there was nothing behind the Wizard of Oz but a smoke machine, the result would be a free-for-all.
What do you think?
Well, neither of us are getting that briefing, but we both have a pretty good sense that Putin’s bad news, which I presume is based on open-source material in both of our cases. Why doesn’t Trump?
I don’t think Putin would be that silly. We’re talking about Donald “I love NATO. It’s a great treaty.” Trump. The candidate whose remarks on military preparedness begin:
Who criticizes current foreign policy in these terms:
Who gives a clear picture of the size and scope of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps that should be built.
Or you have Obamian red lines.
Perhaps. I don’t know the soul of the man. But he seems to have weathered many serious professional and personal setbacks and kept on track sufficiently to be having the time of his life aged 70.
Such intelligence departments have also been studying Hillary’s State Department emails. She will probably be quite predictable to them. They know she is venal and has secrets she would like to keep; they know some of those secrets.
.
Yes to all of #154, but especially this:
Trump has successfully picked up on the value of strategic ambiguity. It might be merely because it’s convenient for hiding the fact that he has no idea what he’s going to do, but then again most con men know the importance of keeping details hazy.
If someone can teach him that talking softly means that you might not have to use the big stick, then maybe he can pull this stuff off.
Oh and while your at it, talk to him about his debate “style” and what Frederick the Great meant when he said “He who defends everything defends nothing.”
Thanks for the lengthy reply. I agree with your assessment where Russia and China are concerned. I see sudden activity in contested parts of the Ukraine as almost certain. However, the fact that U.S. military forces are still in Europe provides a certain level of deterrent, so I don’t see major actions by Russia there. Putin is having enough strategic success vis a vis Europe, thanks to Brexit and the migration, that military action is unnecessary. That said, Ukrainian-style incursions into countries at the extremes, like Estonia, are possible.
With the exception of Japan and the Philippines, the smaller Asian countries concerned about China are already maintaining a certain level of ambiguity and hedging their bets. China has been advancing slowly but inexorably on multiple fronts, and I don’t think they’ll change tack.
I’m not sure that Iran might try to grab anything, since they’re probably still trying to integrate the new capabilities provided by removal of the sanctions. This wouldn’t stop actions by the groups they support.
I agree that allies will be concerned about spending money on new alliance-related matters. However, this occasionally happens with allies now, so I don’t think it’d necessarily have any major or long-term impacts.
Continued below.
Although we see fears of economic instability mentioned in the news, I don’t believe that markets will tank, although short-term losses are possible. However, I agree that unilateral talk of restructuring U.S. debt would be tantamount to declaring economic war. The economies of the other developed countries are also on the ropes, so I think it would start a tit-for-tat process, which could make 2008 look like a picnic. To quote the man: very bad, very bad.
If elected, I’m certain he’ll be interested in maintaining his reputation for success. I’d be looking for soothing teleprompter-guided comments about the value of the global economic system and fair trade. Of course, how you define ‘fair’ is open to a lot of discussion behind closed doors.
Like you, even though it sounds good on the stump, I don’t see a complete banning of Muslims happening. Yet, if it’s framed in different terms, such as an additional layer of immigration controls on Muslims from certain trouble spots, I don’t think it’ll cause any major problems, although the CAIR and Soros-funded crowd will scream loudly. The real challenge will be in changing the environment within the departments of State and Homeland Security, so as to make the policy changes effective.
Continued below.
While there is an increasing number of Japanese who see possession of nuclear weapons as necessary, the public isn’t ready for that now. Yet, if the U.S. fails to support Japan during an actual military confrontation, I think it’ll move the pendulum a lot.
Why would O want to spend much time worrying about running the country, when he’s more focused on his next golf game. With the amount of time he spends on the course, I’m surprised that people don’t refer to him as Tiger. That should be his legacy—so much promise, but results that paled next to the real Tiger.
Last year, during the primary campaign, Trump let slip at one point that some of his more expansive statements were meant to establish new and tough starting points for dealing with foreign countries. This echoes what @percival is saying. In other words, he didn’t really mean all of them, he was just trying to keep other countries off balance and improve his negotiating position. I still think he’s probably trying to do this. Then, you should ask, why on earth is he sidling up to Putin? I would like to believe that he’s trying to see if Putin will overplay his hand. Knowing that we’re talking about Trump, though, it’s more than likely that I’m wrong on this.
The only thing that makes sense to me is that he’s not focusing much attention on it right now. If those who have dealt with him in business are to be trusted, he’ll become interested once he’s in charge. And then, the staffs of DoS and DoD will be able to keep him aware of what Putin is really doing, and show him the laundry list of actions we can use to counter him.
This isn’t the kind of job that one can pick up by watching “the shows.” Trump is winging it and it shows.
About the only intelligent thing Joe Biden ever said was his observation that Obama would be “tested” when he became president. He was, and he failed. We’ve been disheartening our allies and emboldening our adversaries. Obama threw away a hard-won victory in Iraq, conducted a lame-brained operation in Libya, played footsie with the Moslem Brotherhood, rescued the Iranian theocracy while handing them carte blanche to get within a spin of a screwdriver from a nuclear weapon, allowed our military to descend to a perilous level, and futzed around generally.
Trump has to hit the ground running, and he has shown no more aptitude than he had before. In terms of the challenges our country faces, Trump is the poster boy for the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Doesn’t say much for his ability to pick and listen to good advisors, does it?