RUTHFULLY YOURS

Note: Michael Anton is Deputy Assistant to the President for Strategic Communications, National Security Council. This article was prepared before the author accepted his current position. The views here reflect only those of the author. They do not represent the views of the Trump administration, the National Security Advisor, or the U.S. government.

In a year of upset political apple carts, none were rattled harder, or lost more fruit, than traditional notions of American foreign policy. Donald Trump shocked a lot of people over a lot of issues. But no anti-Trump Republican economists orchestrated elaborate letters, with hundreds of signatories, to swear they would never serve in a Trump administration. No dissident Republican trade negotiators ostentatiously switched parties and vowed to support Trump’s opponent. Nor did Republican immigration experts flood the cable networks to renounce and denounce their party’s nominee.

Yet all of the above—and more—happened with respect to foreign policy. The specific reasons why Republican foreign policy operatives chose to denounce Trump’s plans may never be clear. We shall instead explore what we think they had in mind.

Nearly all opponents of President Trump’s foreign policy, from conservatives and Republicans to liberals and Democrats, claim to speak up for the “liberal international order.” A word may have been different here or there (e.g., “world order”) but the basic charge was always the same. Whether voiced by Fareed Zakaria and Yascha Mounk on the left, Walter Russell Mead in the center, Eliot Cohen and Robert Zoellick on the right, or Robert Kagan on the once-right-now-left, the consensus was clear: Trump threatens the international liberal order.
Guarding the Liberal International Order

Sticklers may notice two problems with this argument. First, while a few critics hung their anti-Trumpism on the peg of “temperament,” most preferred to charge Trump with policy recklessness—yet then went on to insist that Trump had no policies at all. We shall leave this objection aside as excusable political hyperbole.

The second problem is much greater: why is it that no one quite got around to saying what, exactly, the “liberal international order” is? One must therefore infer a definition from their complaints, and I shall try to do so fairly, the goal being to understand these writers as they understand themselves.

In ideological terms, the liberal international order (hereafter “LIO”) is the post–World War II consensus among the victorious great powers (excluding the Soviet Union, and later mainland China) on (in descending order of consensus) security, trade, and internal political arrangements. In more concrete terms, it is the constellation of institutions built to further that consensus: the United Nations, NATO, the European Union, and other, later entrants such as the World Bank.

Celebrants of the LIO seem to think that no explanation of its utility or value is necessary. Affirmation is enough because its goodness is self-evident. Trump’s implicit questioning of that order therefore sounds blasphemous. And clerics tend to confront blasphemy not with patient clarification but with strident denunciation.

That the foreign policy establishment of the United States is a kind of priesthood is not necessarily a bad thing. Priests can be useful. Aristotle identifies the priestly function as one of six elements vital to his best regime. More to the point, in every regime, strategy is determined and diplomacy is conducted by an elite. Thinkers and doers from Plato to Machiavelli to the American Founders saw no way around this reality and no reason to find it unjust or worrisome.

Yet the arrangement becomes a problem when the elite forgets or at least can no longer articulate the original rationale for the policies it still advocates. That is the situation American foreign policy has faced since the end of the Cold War, if not before—a situation Trump pointed out in often pungent language.

At first blush, Luis Almagro would seem an unlikely candidate for the disfavor of the current Cuban regime. A man of the political Left, he took office as the tenth secretary general of the Organization of American States in 2015, vowing to use his term of office to reduce inequality throughout the hemisphere. Yet Secretary General Almagro was recently denied a visa to enter Cuba. Why? Because he had been invited to accept an award named in honor of Cuban democracy activist Oswaldo Payá, who died in 2012 in an “automobile accident” that virtually everyone not on the payroll of the Castro regime’s security services regards to this day as an act of state-sanctioned murder. Payá’s “crime” was to organize the Varela Project, a public campaign for basic civil liberties and free elections on the island prison, and he paid for it with his life.

The regime’s refusal of a visa for the head of the OAS caused a brief flurry of comment in those shrinking parts of the commentariat that still pay attention to Cuba, now that Cuban relations with the United States have been more or less “normalized.” But there was another facet of this nasty little episode that deserves further attention: While Almagro’s entry into Cuba was being blocked, a U.S. congressional delegation was on the island and, insofar as is known, did nothing to protest the Cuban government’s punitive action against the secretary general of the OAS.

According to a release from the office of Representative Jim McGovern (D., Mass.), the CoDel, which also included Senators Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.), Thad Cochran (R., Miss.), Michael Bennet (D., Colo.), and Tom Udall (D.,N.M.), and Representative Seth Moulton (D.,Mass.), intended to “continue the progress begun by President Obama to bring U.S.–Cuba relations into the 21st Century and explore new opportunities to promote U.S. economic development with Cuba,” including “economic opportunities for American companies in the agriculture and health sectors.” I’ve no idea whether those economic goals were advanced by this junket. What was certainly not advanced by the CoDel’s public silence on the Almagro Affair while they were in the country was the cause of a free Cuba.

There were and continue to be legitimate arguments on both sides of the question of whether the U.S. trade embargo with Cuba should be lifted. And those pushing for a full recission of the embargo are not simply conscience-lite men and women with dollar signs in their eyes. They include pro-democracy people who sincerely believe that flooding the zone in Cuba with American products, American technology, and American culture will so undermine the Castro regime that a process of self-liberation will necessarily follow. That this seems not to have been the case with China is a powerful counterargument. Meanwhile, my own decidedly minority view — that the embargo should have been gradually rolled back over the past decade and a half in exchange for specific, concrete, and irreversible improvements in human rights and the rule of law, leading to real political pluralization in Cuba — seems to have fallen completely through the floorboards of the debate.

But as pressures to “normalize” U.S.–Cuba relations across the board increase, there ought to be broad, bipartisan agreement that Cuban repression, which has in fact intensified since the Obama initiative two years ago, should have its costs. If, as Congressman McGovern averred, he and others want to move Cuba–America relations into the 21st century, then let him and others who share that goal agree that Cuba should be treated like any other country: meaning that when it does bad things, it gets hammered by criticism and pressures are brought to bear to induce or compel better behavior in the future.

SEOUL—Plans for back-channel talks in New York between government representatives from North Korea and former U.S. officials were scuttled Friday after the State Department withdrew visa approvals for Pyongyang’s top envoy on U.S. relations, according to people familiar with the matter.

The talks, which were scheduled to take place on the first two days of March at a hotel near the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan, where North Korea has a mission, were contingent on the granting of a visa for Choe Son Hui, the director-general of the American affairs bureau in the North Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The plans for the unofficial meeting, which were reported earlier by the Washington Post, came together after several approaches from the North Korean side following Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election, according to one of these people.

It isn’t clear what led the U.S. to deny Ms. Choe the visa. But North Korea’s recent provocations, including the test-firing of a new missile during Mr. Trump’s meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe earlier this month and the suspected assassination in broad daylight of the half brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, may have played a role in souring sentiment on the U.S. side.A State Department spokesman declined to comment, saying it doesn’t discuss the details of individual visa cases.

The meeting, which would have been the first between the two sides on U.S. soil in nearly six years, was to have included two former U.S. officials who planned to push for the release of two Americans imprisoned in Pyongyang.

Ms. Choe has been a frequent interlocutor with her U.S. counterparts in the past, but was less active during the latter half of the Obama administration as the White House turned its focus to striking deals on Iran and Cuba. CONTINUE AT SITE

President Trump’s new National Security Advisor doesn’t believe it is “helpful” to say the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism.”

President Trump’s newly appointed national security adviser has told his staff that Muslims who commit terrorist acts are perverting their religion, rejecting a key ideological view of other senior Trump advisers and signaling a potentially more moderate approach to the Islamic world.

The adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, told the staff of the National Security Council on Thursday, in his first “all hands” staff meeting, that the label “radical Islamic terrorism” was not helpful because terrorists are “un-Islamic,” according to people who were in the meeting.

Wrong. The tens of thousands of people fighting in the “Islamic State” and Al Qaida and Boko Haram and Hamas and Hizbullah are radical Muslims. To pretend that they are not Muslims is to deny who the enemy is, and to give comfort to Muslim governments like Pakistan and Iraq and Afghanistan who are on the fence about confronting radical Islamists in their own rank.

In his language, General McMaster is closer to the positions of former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush. Both took pains to separate acts of terrorism from Islamic teaching, in part because they argued that the United States needed the help of Muslim allies to hunt down terrorists.

So we are now back to the Obama-era policy of refusing to say who the enemy is?

I don’t blame General McMaster for his Obama-style views.

I blame Donald Trump. He and his staff did a terrible job of vetting for this position, especially since an eminently qualified candidate, John Bolton, was available. McMaster’s view of the fight against radical Islam should have been the very first question that Trump asked him. Now it looks like Trump didn’t ask the question at all.

It reminds me how President Trump promised on the campaign trail to bring back waterboarding “and worse” for terrorists, and then hired General Mattis as his Secretary of Defense. After that, Trump seemed surprised to learn that Mattis was against it. Well, so much for another campaign promise.

This has not been his only bad pick. This week he had to fight Betsy DeVos, his own Secretary of Education, who reportedly wanted the federal government to force schools to let disguised boys into girls’ bathrooms.

Donald Trump campaigned for president saying that he knew how to hire the best people. Some of his picks, like Jeff Sessions for Attorney General and Scott Pruitt at the EPA, have been excellent. Others, like George Soros minion Steve Mnuchin at Treasury, and now a NSA advisor who won’t say “radical Islam,” are terrible. I think we could get the same results using a dart board or a roulette wheel.