Category Archives: Foreign Policy

Iran War: Can We Open Hormuz or Denuclearize Iran Without a Ground War? Probably Not

Posted on by
The Strait of Hormuz, including Qeshm which the US probably has to neutralize

I increasingly don’t think that Trump can win this war without going in on the ground. I wrote this up at 1945 magazine this week. Specifically:

1. Opening Hormuz will probably require at least taking a strip of coast on the strait’s Iranian side. Qeshm island is emerging as a key, heavily-fortified location from which Iran threatens Hormuz shipping. So we are now bombing along the Iranian side of the strait to destroy the capabilities which frighten off shipping.

But the Iranians have been preparing for this for decades. They’re dug in. There seems to be a general consensus that we can’t bomb our way into getting the strait opened. So US ground troops are probably necessary to dislodge Iranian coastal power projection. But once you actually land troops – especially if they land on the coast and not just strait islands – the potential for mission creep and an escalating ground war is obvious.

2. If the Iranian clerical regime surives the war, it will sprint for a nuke. They won’t trust negotiations with the US or Israel again for a long time. They will see North Korea as the model: once you have a nuke, you are in a position of strength to bargain, plus you won’t get bombed. The war will strengthen the hardliners who want a nuke for protection.

So now, the only way to keep Iran from getting a nuke is to push the current regime out of power. Ideally, the air strikes would open a window for a domestic revolution to push out the clerics – which might have been possible in January when the dissident movement was on the streets fighting. But they were crushed violently, and there’s been no uprising since we started bomnbing.

Thus the US has to go in, on the ground. Bombing alone won’t provoke regime change. The Iranian people don’t look like they are gonna do it. If the clerics survive, they’re definitely going for a nuke. So the only way to stop that is regime-change which requires a ground war, and we are the only force capable of doing that.

* And yes, I am aware of current idea that we can use special forces to snatch Iran’s nuclear program. That strikes me as unbelievably dangerous. Those facilities will be guarded by Iran’s best troops, and there is no element of surprise to such an operation now, because it’s all over the media. I’d guess that such an operation would fail.

** Yes, Trump could just withdraw and drop the whole thing. He could ‘TACO,’ which markets still seem to expect. I doubt this, primarily for psychological reasons, as I have been arguing on Twitter for a week now. Trump can’t admit defeat. He can’t process it. He will almost certainly escalate to at least a limited ground incursion, and there are no Congressional checks-and-balances to stop him.

Iran War: Will the US Ever Pivot to Asia? It Sure Doesn’t Look Like It

Posted on by
Hillary Clinton’s original, 2011 article in Foreign Policy announcing the pivot

I wrote a couple op-eds this week on this question of the ‘pivot’ in the wake of yet another US Mideast war – one at Channel News Asia, another at 1945. Here’s the arguement flow:

  • the strategic case (China) for the pivot to Asia is stronger than ever
  • the Iran War is probably going to be bigger and longer than we thought
  • so we can’t pivot more to East Asia for while
  • in fact, we are ‘de-pivoting’ – i.e., moving resources from East Asia to the Persian Gulf
  • also, a lot of Americans don’t want the US to pivot out of the Middle East for religious reasons
  • at least we are pivoting out of Europe. It’s long overdue that Europe do far more for its own defense and take the lead
  • Trump’s interest in Western Hemispheric hegemony will pull away resources better sent to East Asia
  • So the pivot is probably dead
  • So Japan and South Korea better start spending more on defense and cooperating more

I wrote an academic article on the pivot twelve years ago (here), where I argued that American Protestant fundamentalism is the big domestic reason the US can’t quit the Middle East for East Asia. 40+% of Americans believe that Israel plays a major role in the End Times and/or sees Israel as a Western, civilizational bulwark against Islam which they hate/fear. So you’ve got both eschatology and the ‘clash of civilzations’ motivating a deep, religious conservative commitment to America’s presence in the Middle East.

China does not move Americans like that. To most Americans, China is some place farway which makes cheap stuff you buy at Walmart. Does grandma care that much about Taiwan? Probably not. Yes, the American foreign policy community is really worried about China, but the voters don’t care about foreign policy much, and the GOP detests America’s intellectual class. So nobody is listening to us. If they did, we wouldn’t be fighting Iran right now.

So here we are, in yet another Middle Eastern war with yet another president talking about regime change and fighting evil, with the pivot pushed off into the future yet again.

The Trump Doctrine: Rogue State Elite Replacement

Posted on by
Delcy Rodríguez, the new, sorta pro-American despot of Venezuela

I put up some thoughts on Trump ending the war in Iran at 1945 magazine. We’re moving toward putting a pro-US stooge in the place of now-deceased Iranian leader Khamenei so that we can withdraw quickly. It seems like this is what Trump wants – basically a replay of the Venezuelan drive-by decapitation we did in early January.

The idea, as Steven Taylor similarly notes, is to replace the anti-American elite of a rogue state, through swift, surprising violence, with a new, pro-Amerincan despot while the rest of the regime is left intact. That way, there is no messy nation-building, reconstruction, democratization, and so on. Trump pretty obviously doesn’t care about democracy, and the US public opposes LDC nation-building. So just bumping off a leadership we dislike and replacing it with a stooge seems pretty easy by comparison. We swing a troublesome state into our column by replacing its elites, not its regime.

At 1945, I call this emergent method ‘rogue state elite replacement‘ – in contradistinction to regime change, democratization, tranition, and so on.

Here, at last, we have a ‘Trump Doctrine’ (or Method), and it fits Trump perfectly. It ignores democracy, development, international law, and so on for raw, short-term American interest from individial gangster leaders Trump can bully for pay-offs. Get rid of anti-American leaders; put in pro-American leaders; put the screws to them; get the hell out: ‘He may be a son of a b*tch, but he’s our son of b*tch.’

If Trump can get this to work in Iran, as it seems to be working in Venezuela, I figure Cuba is next on the hit list.

Iran War: Trump Goes Full Neocon in the Biggest Gamble of His Presidency

Posted on by

I posted my first thoughts on the Iran war over at 1945; please go there. But my short take is that this thing is going to require a ground war to do right. And Trump seemed to admit that when he told Iranians to rise up in his first war speech on Saturday.

By now everyone knows that airpower isn’t enough for regime change. Robert Pape has banging away at that all week. So you need some force on the ground to actually snatch power from those who have it now.

The obvious choice is the Iranian dissident movement. But they were crushed in January. Indeed, thatwas the time to launch this operation. We could have targeted strikes to help the protestors, destroying security forces and their weapons to give the revolt on the streets a fighting chance. But Trump had moved the needed naval assets to the Carribean so that he could kidnap Maduro. So we missed our chance.

Maybe we will get lucky, and whatever is left of the resistance will hit the streets again to fight on the ground as we pound Iran from the air. But the risk is obvious; the resistance is weakened because of the January massacre; and Trump cannot make credible commitments (to support them). Who knows if he will actually support an uprising. He sold out the democratic opposition in Venezuela to get a ‘deal’ with Maduro’s regime successor. I’d bet he would sell out any Iranian uprising to get a deal with Khamenei’s successor.

So if we want regime change, we have to go in on the ground. Trump likely won’t do that. So instead of regime change, we are getting elite replacement: some vaguely pro-American, or at least less fanatical islamist, ruler in the place of Khamenei.

Given that we did this in Venezuela and will probably do it in Cuba soon, a ‘Trump Doctrine’ is emerging: knock off anti-American elites in rogue states, put in a stooge who will do what we till him/her, and then get out. So we are back to ‘he is a son of a b****, but he’s our son of a b****.’

A North Korean SSBN is an Advertent Escalation Risk

Posted on by

images (1)What might bring us (the US, South Korea, Japan) to deliberately attack North Korea? Are there triggers for deliberate (advertent) escalation, on top of the traditional, nuclear age fears of accidental (inadvertent) escalation? The following is from my essay on this for 1945 magazine and Twitter thread.

To me it seems like the most likely trigger for us to deliberately bomb NK is NK building a nuclear missile-carrying submarine (an SSBN). An SSBN would significantly improve the ‘survivability’ of NK nuclear missiles, which is problematic for us two reasons:

1. A more survivable force would reduce the ability of the allies to disarm NK by force if necessary in a crisis, because it is much harder to find missiles undersea than on land. The land constraint on NK missiles is particularly tough for them, bc NK is small in size, too poor to build a lot of roads, and is fill with mountains and forests.

2. If NK’s nuclear force was more assured and survivable, NK might take greater conventional risks in its provocations of SK, per the logic of the stability-instability paradox. NK has long history of shenanigans along the SK border. One of these spinning out of control has always been the big inadvertent escalation risk in Korea. That will worsen once they have an SSBN fleet.

Given that the US has long sought ‘damage limitation’ in its nuclear affairs – that is, America persistently rejects mutually assured destruction (MAD) as acceptable and inescapable – it is foreseeable that the US would see bombing a NK SSBN under construction as an acceptable risk to keep NK from attaining a MAD relationship with the US.

We claim close to bombing NK in 2017/18 because they were on the cusp of an ICBM which could reach the US mainland, and we have repeatedly intervened in Iran to halt its nuclear progress. So bombing NK to block the advent of MAD is not fantastical. Of all the possibilities for deliberate, chosen escalation with NK, I think this is the most likely.

If Trump Takes Greenland, the US would Struggle to Project Power into the Middle East – My Latest for ‘1945’ Magazine

Posted on by

ImageSo Trump has decided not to take Greenland by force. He announced that today at Davos. This is great news. It was becoming pretty apparent that a military move might:

– spark a stock market meltdown

– be met by force (even if we would win)

– break NATO

– lead to massive European Union counter-sanctions

– spark yet another impeachment effort against Trump

– provoke a civil-military crisis in the US (because the US military might not follow attack orders on the belief that they are illegal, because NATO’s 1949 Washington Treaty is signed and ratified and, therefore, US law).

But there is another possible cost which I saw little discussed: the loss of US bases in Europe in the wake a NATO’s implosion, and the consequent loss of US power projection into the Middle East. I develop this idea here, in my weekly column for 1945 web-magazine.

Here is my core claim:

[Expulsion of the US military from Europe in the wake of NATO’s rupture] will dramatically reduce America’s ability to project power into Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. The US has dozens of bases in Europe. These are its largest in the world outside of the US mainland. They enable the US to project force throughout the western Eurasia and North Africa; they provide the massive logistic tail needed for modern military operations. Particularly, US airbases and friendly ports permit the maintenance and support required by modern, hi-tech air and sea platforms. As one former US commander in Europe put it, “a large-scale withdrawal would make US power projection slower, costlier, and less effective.”

MAGA might argue that the US does not need to project power into Europe or Africa…But Trump’s coalition does care – quite intensely – about US power projection into the Middle East. Trump’s staunchest supporters are evangelical Christians. For them, US alignment with Israel is a core national security priority, as is the ability to strike Muslim states perceived as anti-American. European logistical hubs help substantially with that. US bases in Middle East tend to be smaller and more politically controversial with their hosts than those in Europe.

I also point out that MAGA might not even have grasped this problem. Americans have become so accustomed to US global dominance – it’s 81 years now since we emerged on top after WWII – that I think we just take it for granted. We just don’t get that we need allies and partners to project into far away places like the Persian Gulf. MAGA certainly doesn’t get that at all. Their relentless belligerence strongly suggests they think the US can do almost anything without losing allies. That is incorrect.

My Latest for Foreign Affairs: It’s a Only a Matter of Time before US Allies Hedge America, even if the Democrats Win in 2028

Posted on by

Trump plan exploit US alliesI wrote a short essay for Foreign Affairs, with my friend Paul Poast of the University of Chicago, on Trump’s treatment of US allies. This is follow-up on a longer article we wrote in 2022 for FA. (And the great pic for this post comes from this article, which is a good read.)

Our argument in 2022 was that US allies were willing to absorb a lot more US abuse – under Trump – than people expected. In 2022, there was a lot of talk about how Biden ‘must’ reassure US allies after years of Trumpian mistreatment. And while I normatively agreed with the sentiment, it was clearly empirically wrong. The US did not need to apologize or anything like that, because US allies had proven willing to debase themselves before Trump rather than hedge America.

So when FA asked me and Paul to provide an update, we were surprised at how correct our argument still was. Trump I was abusive to allies, and nothing happened; Trump II was turning out to be even worse, and still nothing was happening. If anything, US allies were proving yet again that they were willing to embarrass themselves with obsequious flattery to keep the US on-side. Why they tolerate American abuse is a good question. Learned helplessness – decades living cozily under the US security blanket – has to be a big part of it.

On the other hand though, this can’t go on forever. Paul and I estimate that over the next ten years, US allies will, at last, hedge. Under Trump I, hoping that Trump’s successor would be a normal, liberal internationalist Democrat – as Biden was – made sense as strategy. But now, under Trump II, US allies need to grasp that the American Right has structurally changed. Trump is not a fluke; Trumpism, complete with its disdain for US allies and sympathy for dictators, is US conservatism now.

This means that whenever the GOP holds the presidency over the next several decades, the US will not be a credible alliance partner. Even if reliable Democrats are also elected occasionally, intermittent Trumpist control of the presidency still makes the US too unreliable as a partner for its alliances to be credible commitments. In short, you can trust us much anymore, even if we occasionally elect normal presidents. And this unreliability will motivate hedging and drift as US allies finally realize – after a decade of purposefully pretending otherwise – that Trump has changed US foreign policy for the medium-term.

The full essay follows the jump:

Continue reading →

My Latest for Foreign Policy, Un-Paywalled: Israel’s Air Campaign against Iran is Exactly why N Korea Built Nukes and won’t Give Them Up

Posted on by

ec0ac160-4929-11f0-bbaa-4bc03e0665b7This is the un-paywalled version of an essay I wrote for Foreign Policy on Monday.

Israel’s preventive disarming strike on Iran last month is a model of what the US and South Korea would do to North Korea – either as a ‘bloody nose’ strike, or in the opening days of a second Korean war. Deterring that from happening is why North Korea built nuclear weapons.

And now that we have helped Israel in the attack – after reneging on our 2015 deal with Iran – North Korea will never denuclearize. That is the very obvious lesson for NK to draw from Israel’s war of choice. This is the core point I make in my FP essay. In fact, NK probably won’t even negotiate arms control with us now. Instead Pyongyang will likely build up even more – convinced that if Iran, Iraq, and Libya had nukes, they never would have been attacked by Western power, which is almost certainly true.

The repeated use of Western power against non-nuclear rogue states – Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Serbia, and, sort of, Cuba & Venezuela – signals to illiberal and anti-western countries that nuking up is your best defense. That we broke our word to Libya in 2011 and, especially, Iran in 2018 reinforces that signal.

Trump particularly deserves blame here. Kaddafi was already in trouble in 2011 when Obama reneged on 2003 nuclear deal, and Kaddafi was promising an enormous bloodbath in Benghazi if we did not intervene. By contrast, the Iran deal of 2015 was working when Trump pulled out of it for no substantive reason. (He did it to please the GWoT hawks and End Times-craving evangelicals in his coalition.) That sent a huge signal to anti-western countries everywhere: the US will not negotiate with you in good faith on nukes; secretly sprinting for nukes is the best way to get security.

No one learned this lesson better than NK. For decades Pyongyang disbelieved our security assurances and pushed relentlessly for nukes. Nukes, as I write in the FP essay, are a ‘unique shield.’ Nothing can replace their deterrent power – certainly not a deal with the US which MAGA will just dump when it is convenient. So now, we should prepare for a world where other nuclear-curious rogues sprint for NWs too.

The full essay follows the jump:

Continue reading →

Original Version of My Foreign Affairs Essay on South Korean Nuclearization: America’s Response to Nuclear Risk in the Ukraine War Tells Us a Lot about its Likely Response in a Second Korean War

Posted on by

Screenshot 2025-01-11 134514This post is the original version of an article I published this month in Foreign Affairs on potential South Korean nuclearization with my friend Kim Min-Hyung. I think the editing made the essay more readable, but some topics I wanted to elaborate got edited out.

Specifically, US hesitation against fully and robustly supporting Ukraine against Russia – because of Russia’s nuclear threats – is a model for what will happen to South Korea in a second Korean war, especially when Trump is POTUS.

We have known for years that the Biden administration has repeatedly held back on aid, discouraged certain Ukrainian military actions, balked at giving certain weapons systems, and so on for fear of Russian nuclear ‘red lines.’ Here is yet another example from the last few days. Apparently, the Biden team got Russia out of an even bigger defeat around Kherson in 2022 for fear of a Russian nuclear response. Russia’s nuclear threats have worked well, and they aren’t even as credible as North Korea’s!

A lot people think the Russians are just bluffing, but the Biden team has been super cautious anyway. So in a Korean contingency, where NK nuclear threats are even more credible, our behavior in Ukraine suggests we will respond even more cautiously. Our Ukraine behavior strongly suggests we will slowroll aid to SK and try to avoid full involvement for fear of nuclear escalation.

NK nuclear escalation threats are more credible than Russia’s or China’s, because NK is far more vulnerable to collapse after just a single significant conventional defeat than they are. NK’s military is conventionally obsolete; NK lacks strategic depth; its economy is a shambles; its state is sclerotic and shallow. One big defeat at the DMZ, and it’s all over for NK and the Kims who will be lynched by their own people. Russia by contrast does not face regime collapse and an existential leadership crisis if it loses badly conventionally in Ukraine; nor does China face immediate implosion if it loses in a war over Taiwan. But NK and its ruling family do face immediate existential risk if they lose even one battle at the DMZ. So NK has to threaten nuclear use immediately, and it has to use those weapons if its bluff is called. It can’t issue vague, maybe-sorta threats like Putin has for the last 3 years.

So if Russian not-so-credible threat have successfully gotten the US and NATO to slow-roll aid to Ukraine, imagine how much more successful they will be in Korea where NK’s nuclear threats are far more credible because nuclear escalation is its only chance to survive?

If NK will go nuclear almost certainly, will the US risk nuclear strikes on US targets for a distant, medium-sized ally of mid-range importance to US national security? Probably not – because that also describes Ukraine. Like SK, Ukraine is an exposed, mid-sized ally of middling importance to US security under direct nuclear threat. In both cases, a victory by the US partner would be good, but its loss would not be a huge loss for the US either. It would be more important for regional locals. Specifically, SK’s defeat/destruction by NK (or China) is more important to Japan, India, and Australia than to the US, just as Ukraine’s is more important to Europe than to the US.

Now, you say that SK is a treaty ally of the US, but Ukraine is not. So the US will be willing to risk nuclear war for SK, but not for Ukraine. I find this fantastical thinking. US alliance commitments are credible in conventional scenarios in Korea, but would they really be in a contingency where NK would launch a nuclear weapon against Guam, Hawaii, or even CONUS? Are alliance commitments automatic in nuclear escalation scenarios? I doubt that. De Gaulle realized this point 65 years ago. Maybe Biden would act on the US alliance commitment to SK despite high nuclear risk, but Trump very obviously won’t. In fact, I doubt Trump would even fight conventionally for SK.

Then you object that SK is not a mid-sized partner like Ukraine which could be lost, but a major ally because we need it against China. This would be so if SKs wanted to come with us on great power competition with China. But they don’t, especially not the SK left which is about to take the presidency when impeached conservative president Yoon is removed in the next few months.

So if you don’t think the US is going to risk highly like nuclear escalation for you; and you face a frightening nuclear opponent who routinely threatens you with nuclear devastation; and your alliance patron is about to be governed by an irresponsible, autocrat-admiring con-man, what should you do?

If you think about potential SK nuclearization that way, it’s not too hard to figure out why SK opinion tilts towards nukes.

The original, pre-edited version of my essay follows the jump:

Continue reading →

No, Donald Trump is Not a Realist or China Hawk; He’s Too Ill-Disciplined for That: The Full Version of My Trump Essay for Foreign Policy

Posted on by

AP-putin-trump-handshake-g20-jef-170710_16x9_1600Trump is too lazy, ill-disciplined, and venal to be the ‘thinker’ or strategist realist and China-first hawks keep trying to make him out to be. This post is the longer and pre-edited version of an essay I just wrote for Foreign Policy magazine.

In fact, I am amazed anyone thinks Trump has the discipline to do this. Are you not watching the same Trump – erratic, confused, chaotic – the rest of us are? Trump is far more likely to simply sell US foreign policy to the highest bidder if he becomes president. He loves money and adulation. The Chinese and the Russians are more than happy to throw that at him to get him to bend on their interests.

We keep hearing that Trump will prioritize China and Taiwan over Europe and Ukraine, but listen to what he says about Taiwan and China. He doesn’t sound a realist at all. He dislikes Taiwan for protectionist and free-riding reasons, and he clearly admires Xi Jinping’s autocracy.

The best predictor for Trump’s second term is what he did in the first term, and that was a confused mess. He dislikes Ukraine – and will surrender it to Russia – because Zelenskyy wouldn’t help him cheat in the 2020, not because of a strategic re-prioritization toward Asia.

Maybe realists will get their wished-for realignment or re-prioritization out of Trump’s staff. Perhaps Elbridge Colby will push that through. But it’s hard to imagine a major foreign policy realignment without POTUS’ consent, if not participation. And Trump just isn’t focused enough. Worse, Trump has a tendency to staff himself with clowns. Your more likely to get incompetence out of a Trump second term than anything.

The full, unedited FP essay is below the jump. Continue reading →