US foreign policy ‘goals’ are really out of step with our actions abroad

The Trump administration recently published its national security strategy and national military strategy. Unfortunately, these documents cannot answer concrete policy questions.

But regardless of these documents’ contents it is incumbent upon the administration to decide upon its policy ion such hot spots as Korea and the Middle East for all too often crises in one or another small country reverberate around the world and generate much greater crises in world politics. World War I, the Vietnam War and the perennial crises in the Middle East all attest, in one way or another, to the truth of that observation.

This brings us to the heart of the matter. In countries like North Korea and/or Syria what exactly does the administration want? How does it propose to achieve those goals? And what are the larger consequences of the administration’s continuing pursuit by present means of those goals?

{mosads}In Korea for sure, and apparently in Syria, the continuing pursuit of whatever goal Washington is seeking and ratcheting up global tensions without showing any sings so far of benefitting the U.S. For example, as regards North Korea the administration supposedly has a clear goal. North Korea must renounce nuclear weapons before we will negotiate. In other words, the outcome of the negotiation process must precede the actual bilateral or multilateral talks. To this end the administration is bringing maximum pressure on Pyongyang and attempting to do so as well through China and Russia.

No state will negotiate its survival and North Korea, twisted as it is, nevertheless can point to Libya, Iraq, and Ukraine as examples of states that renounced nuclear weapons, that had security guarantees (Ukraine and Libya) yet nevertheless were invaded and torn apart, and in the Middle Eastern cases it was the U.S. who did so.

Consequently, Pyongyang sees no guarantees for its survival other than nuclear weapons and while it proclaims it will negotiate about other issues, it will not negotiate away its rights to nuclear weapons. Considering this, the means chosen by this administration not only raise pressure on Pyongyang, they also trigger worldwide fears that we are about to use force in a preventive way to force North Korean denuclearization.

Yet these means and the unpremeditated use of force almost certainly will trigger a Chinese counter-intervention, as in the Korean War, and probably trigger Russian support for it. We should remember that Soviet pilots flew combat missions against us during that war.

In other wards, the means chosen to date work against our successful attainment of our objectives. We have abundant evidence that neither Moscow nor Beijing will abandon Pyongyang or support our demands and that our intransigence and loose talk about limited war merely provokes further resistance. Thus our objectives are unattainable, and the means chosen to reach them perversely frustrate the achievement of our goals, rendering the continuing pursuit of those objectives all the more likely to engender a huge international crisis.

In Syria, U.S. support for Assad’s ouster is going nowhere because we have no leverage on anyone who can bring about this change and no instrument with which to achieve it unilaterally. Indeed, our efforts are now provoking Moscow and Turkey throughout support for a Kurdish army in Syria, which raises fears of a Kurdish state or autonomous zone, whatever our protestations to Ankara may be.

It is by no means inconceivable that Turkey, in its determination to launch an offensive against the Kurds, Assad’s determination, so far supported by Moscow and Tehran to reassert control over all of Syria, and Moscow’s control of Syrian air space could trigger a conflict with our NATO ally, Turkey or a Turco-American rift at the same time.

Admittedly, resolving Syria’s civil war is another problem from hell. But if we have no way of actually achieving our preference for an Assad-free Syria how are we going to achieve that without endangering our alliances or international peace on a grander scale. Here again our objective seems to be ill- or badly conceived, the means realizing it nonexistent, and the consequences of continuing to repeat what we have been doing highly dangerous, especially given the apparent lack of thought as to the consequences of our actions upon other actors there.

Thus, notwithstanding the ringing tones of these national strategies, we must pose hard questions to the administration about its policies in these cases if not elsewhere. And they must answer those questions, not just because we pose them but also because international peace and security rests upon judicious American foreign and defense policies. Thee problems will not go away and the rhetorical assertion of force neither meliorates them nor facilitates resolution. Quite the opposite is the case. Until means and goals are in alignment those documents will merely remain “scraps of paper” while other, more antagonistic forces that know what they want — and how to get it — exploit our all too visible dysfunction.

Stephen Blank, Ph.D., is a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council. He is the author of numerous foreign policy-related articles, white papers and monographs, specifically focused on the geopolitics and geostrategy of the former Soviet Union, Russia and Eurasia. He is a former MacArthur fellow at the U.S. Army War College.