Bluster/distract/cave won’t work
Donald Trump’s much-vaunted negotiating skills have produced virtually nothing in the past eight months of his singularly unproductive presidency. What do we know about his approach to negotiating? How is it working?
Trump’s first stage is bluster: locked and loaded, fire and fury. He threatens the worst possible outcome for his opponent, ignoring the implications for himself and his country. He has done this not only with North Korea, but also with the repeal of Obamacare (watch out! it’s collapsing!) and the budget ceiling (I’ll close down the government unless I get my wall!). Not to mention the nuclear deal with Iran (the worst deal ever!). This bluster attracts a lot of media attention, but it ignores what is crucial in negotiation: your own alternative to a negotiated agreement.
Then Trump quickly tacks in a different direction, before it is apparent that bluster isn’t working. Anything else will do, so long as it distracts from the main item he has put on the agenda. A hurricane will serve the purpose, as will a campaign trip to North Dakota or some other domestic political distraction like the competence of Speaker Ryan or Senate majority leader McConnell. The more bizarre the distraction, the better, since its purpose is to make the original issue evaporate, a bit like the magician’s use of distraction to make a rabbit disappear.
Then Trump caves on the original issue. He did this yesterday at the UN Security Council, accepting a resolution that falls far short of his announced goal of ending trade with North Korea, but only after taking advantage of the distraction caused by Hurricane Irma.
He is getting ready to do something similar with the Iran nuclear deal: he may claim that Iran is not complying (bluster) and throw the issue to the Congress (distraction), but he won’t withdraw from the deal (that’s the caving) because he knows by now it is better than no deal (that’s what the Israelis and Saudis are telling him). Instead, he’ll do something I think is quite sensible: focus on Iranian (mis)behavior in the Middle East, which is a real and growing problem.
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) got this treatment. Trump feinted about withdrawal, then allowed months of distractions and ended up with a renegotiation the Canadians and Mexicans were happy to engage in, because they’ve got complaints about the current decades-old agreement as well. He did not do this with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), from which he simply withdrew. But that story may not be over yet. I suspect the US will eventually find its way back in, if the countries of the region want to continue the process.
There are of course things Trump just doesn’t like, so the bluster is real. The climate change treaty is one of those, though the recent storms seem to be making some Republicans think maybe we need to do something to reduce their likelihood, even if they don’t agree on human causation. I won’t be surprised if Trump, who once supported action on climate change as a businessman, changes his mind as well.
How is bluster/distract/cave working? Well enough domestically for Trump to retain his core support. But internationally it is a disaster. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on you, is the general rule in international affairs. Watch the Russians, who are reacting vigorously against a president they once thought they owned. The Chinese aren’t likely to be friendly about it either. Trump is going to find himself where he did in the real estate business: a creditor only third tier institutions and individuals will do business with. It is no accident that he gets praise from people whose governance is notoriously corrupt.
Bluster/distract/cave won’t work on serious people, who learn quickly that all they really need to do is wait Trump out, so long as they have a decent alternative to a negotiated agreement.
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Peace picks September 11 – 15
- Sixteen Years After 9/11: Assessing the Terrorist Threat | Monday, September 11 | 12:15 pm – 1:45 pm | New America | Register Here | Sixteen years have passed since the attacks of 9/11, and three presidents have now wrestled with calibrating an effective American response to the threat of jihadist terrorism. Where does the terrorist threat stand today? How effective has the Trump administration been in confronting the threat? What will the threat look like tomorrow? To address these questions, New America welcomes Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and CEO of Valens Global, a private firm focused on the challenge posed by violent non-state actors; Joshua Geltzer, a fellow in New America’s International Security program, who served from 2015 to 2017 as senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council staff, having served previously as deputy legal advisor to the National Security Council and as counsel to the assistant attorney general for national security at the Department of Justice; and Nadia Oweidat, a Middle East fellow at New America, who holds a D.Phil. in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford, and who is currently working on a book on social media and positive change among Arabic speakers.
- Unclear Physics: Why Iraq and Libya Failed to Build Nuclear Weapons | Wednesday, September 13 | 3:30 – 5:00 pm | Wilson Center | Register Here | Many authoritarian leaders want nuclear weapons, but few manage to acquire them. Autocrats seeking nuclear weapons fail in different ways and to varying degrees—Iraq almost managed it; Libya did not come close. In this seminar, Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer compares the two failed nuclear weapons programs, arguing that state capacity played a crucial role in the trajectory and outcomes of both projects. This analysis is based on a rich set of new primary sources, collected during years of research in archives, fieldwork across the Middle East, and interviews with scientists and decision makers from both states. The analysis reveals contemporary perspectives from scientists and regime officials on the opportunities and challenges facing each project. Many of the findings challenge the conventional wisdom about clandestine weapons programs in closed authoritarian states, particularly the level of oversight and control by regime officials, and offers novel arguments about their prospects of success or failure.
- America’s Role in the World – Global Threats, Global Perspectives | Thursday, September 14 | 5:00 pm | Atlantic Council | Register Here | The day’s discussion will explore the results of Pew Research Center’s survey, which focused on global perspectives on the greatest risks facing the world today, from national security concerns to broader global issues such as climate change, and the economy, and included thirty-eight countries. Does the existential threat of ISIS affect people outside of the Middle East and Europe? Where are worries of the influence of the United States, Russia, or China most acute? Following a short presentation of the report, the panelists will evaluate the circumstances and tenuous relationships that may account for the findings. The conversation will feature Jacob Poushter of the Pew Research Center, Ellen Laipson of the Stimson Center, David Anderson of Zurich North America, and Mathew Burrows of the Atlantic Council. The panel will be moderated by Kate Brannen, the Deputy Managing Editor at Just Security.
- Pushback: Exposing and Countering Iran | Thursday, September 14 | 12:00 pm | Atlantic Council | Register Here | Much is said about Iran’s “destabilizing activities” throughout the Middle East, but often without fully describing the activities, tools, and methods Iran uses to wield influence in neighboring states. What do we really know about Iran’s activities in the region? What are the primary factors driving Iran’s foreign policy? These are the questions the Atlantic Council seeks to answer through a new project entitled Pushback: Exposing and Countering Iran. This series examines the drivers, prospects, and constraints underpinning Iran’s efforts to undermine US policy in the Middle East and restructure the regional order to its liking. Drawing on new digital forensic evidence and expert analysis, this effort offers strategic and policy recommendations to address the growing challenge Iran poses to stability in the Middle East. Center for Strategic and International Studies senior fellow and deputy director Melissa Dalton, Atlantic Council nonresident fellow Elisabeth Kendall, Conflict Armament Research’s Tim Michetti, and Shia militia group researcher Phillip Smyth will discuss Iran’s regional tactics, while Middle East Institute director and senior fellow Bilal Y. Saab, American Enterprise Institute resident scholar Ken Pollack, Johns Hopkins SAIS’s Mara Karlin, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Arabian Peninsula Affairs Susan Ziadeh, and New York Times Washington correspondent David Sanger, will discuss the United States’ strategic options for countering Iran’s influence.
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Fox for president
I’m taking off for Turkey this afternoon and don’t have time to write anything as good as this Vicente Fox video, which may offend some viewers, as it is particularly suitable for teenagers:
Can you imagine a former president of the United States speaking a foreign language so colloquially as to be able to do something comparable to a foreign leader?
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Incoherence is poison
The United States is objectively no less powerful than it was seven months ago. Its military forces, its economy, even its political system are virtually unchanged in that short period. Only the presidency has changed hands, with all that entails in terms of personnel and policy.
But American capacity to effect the changes Washington wants to see in the world are diminished: it is unable to rally support from China and Russia for strict sanctions on North Korea, it has made no progress in countering Russian aggression in Ukraine (not to mention Moldova and Georgia), the squabble among Gulf countries has limited its ability to push back against expanded Iranian presence and influence in the region, and neither Palestinians nor Israelis are inclined to pay the Americans much mind. Adversaries are defiant, allies are nervous, and those in between are hedging.
This weakness is largely the result of incoherence. It is a rare day that President Trump, Secretaries Mattis and Tillerson, National Security Adviser McMaster, and UN Ambassador Haley are even close to being tuned to the same wave length. Far more often they each go their own way, pushing or denying military options, pursuing or dropping diplomatic initiatives, befriending or criticizing dictators.
Why they say what they do is rarely clear, and when clear often illogical. Why refuse to certify that Iran is complying with a nuclear deal that everyone else in the world (including the professionals who staff the State and Defense Departments as well as the US intelligence agencies) says it is complying with? Is that because there is some unwritten “spirit” of the agreement? Or is it just to have an excuse to go to war? Or maybe it’s just a way of fulfilling an election campaign pledge but shedding responsibility for real action to the Congress, as with the elimination of DACA (Delayed Action for Childhood Arrivals)? No one knows.
Worse: it has become unknowable. The President disdains logic as much as he does facts. What is the logic of threatening the free trade agreement with South Korea when he needs Seoul on board for whatever he wants to do about North Korea? He reacts, based on instinct, and often in different ways on different days, or even different hours. There is really nothing wrong with instinct, or to put it more accurately with heuristics, rules of thumb based on experience. We all use them, including the wisest among us, despite their well-documented distortions. The trouble is the President has no relevant experience. Nor has he read or studied enough to substitute for his inexperience.
This matters as much in politics as it does in foreign policy. Senator McConnell and Speaker Ryan have now been sandbagged (in governmentese that means being surprised by an unexpected and often gratuitous move) more than once by this President. Yesterday, he cut a deal with the Democrats on the budget and hurricane relief that the Republican leadership had publicly stated they would not accept. McConnell and Ryan have thus far not responded in kind. I wouldn’t expect that to last. What goes around comes around.
The one subject on which Washington has reached some limited degree of coherence is, ironically, Russia. Congress reacted to the President’s illogical and seemingly unmotivated affection for Vladimir Putin with sanctions that are coherent and difficult to remove. But that limited coherence of course amplifies the greater incoherence. We still have a president hankering for improved relations with Russia even as the State Department closes down its consulate in San Francisco and orders its diplomats out of the US, in retaliation for a draconian cut Putin ordered in staffing of the US embassy in Moscow.
We’ve also got a President who tells DACA kids how much he loves them and will do something ill-defined for them if Congress doesn’t, while he lets an Attorney General who openly advocates limiting immigration on racial and religious grounds announce that DACA is kaput. Not to mention the presidential pardon for a sheriff who physically abused immigrants, often without regard to whether they were documented or not.
America will be weaker still if Jeff Sessions gets his way and begins to deport those 800,000 productive non-citizens who have spent most of their lives, and careers, in the US. Incoherence is not just dissonance. It will sap America’s strength and render a country founded on admirable principles, but unable to implement them effectively, great only in retrospect. Incoherence is poison. We need to get it out of our system.
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The Dreamers and the Rohingya
Yes, of course there are important differences between what President Trump has decided to do–remove the “deferred action” status accorded by President Obama to 800,000 people, most of whom have never lived anyplace but the US–and Myanmar’s efforts to expel Rohingya who have lived there for generations. Trump isn’t burning the Dreamers’ houses to the ground or forcibly expelling them from the US (at least not yet). But they will become subject to deportation–even though they may have lived their entire conscious lives in the US–and the basic motive is similar: to rid the country of people who don’t fit an ethnic definition of citizenship.
The Rohingya are mostly Muslims (some are Hindu) in a majority-Buddhist country, one that rejects their claim to citizenship despite generations of living in Myanmar. The Dreamers are mostly Latinos (78% Mexican) brought as children to the US illegally by their parents. Apart from the President (as candidate) challenging a judge’s bona fides because his parents were Mexican, there isn’t much Trump and Attorney General Sessions can do about the millions of Latino citizens already in the US, so they are targeting whom they can. Anyone who thinks this is not ethnically motivated hasn’t spent any time listening to Jeff Sessions or Donald Trump, both of whom have openly advocated discriminatory immigration policies.
President Trump ducked announcing the end of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and left it to Jeff Sessions, who refused to take questions. No new DACA applications will be accepted and the program will end March 5, 2018. There is of course the possibility Congress will pass corrective legislation, but the main reason President Obama instituted DACA by executive order was its failure to do so. With the legislative agenda bursting, it is not clear that immigration policy can get to the top of the priority list.
Deportation of Dreamers will be relatively easy. In exchange for deferred action, they registered with the US government, which therefore knows where they live and how to get in touch with them. For the Dreamers, many of whom don’t even speak Spanish (or another language native to their parents’ place of origin), deportation would be a wrenching experience: deprived of the country they grew up in, placed in a cultural and linguistic context with which they are unfamiliar, and separated permanently from their lifetime and career ambitions. Cruel is not too strong a word.
Of course all this will be challenged in court. There the Dreamers are a lot better off than the Rohingya, who haven’t got that option. But the odds of winning in court in the absence of a legislative fix are not good. Courts have a way of not wanting to validate illegal acts, even indirectly. We can hope they will see deportation as going to far, but that doesn’t seem likely. I hope I’m wrong about that.
President Trump has assured the Dreamers repeatedly that they have nothing to fear. But of course he has promised his core supporters that he would get rid of both DACA and large numbers of Latinos. There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind which commitment he is keeping.
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Kim is winning because Trump
Permanent Representative Haley is pushing hard this week for a new UN Security Council resolution on North Korea, one that brings maximum economic pressure to bear, even as President Trump continues to mumble about military options rather than negotiations. Kim Jong-un appears to be paying neither any mind. Why not?
The short answer is BATNA: best alternative to a negotiated agreement. His is better than ours:
- He can ignore our military bluster because he now has both a conventional deterrent–a massive artillery attack on Seoul–and a nuclear one. There can be no more doubting Pyongyang’s capability of hitting at least US allies (and the US forces stationed in them) with a nuclear weapon.
- He can ignore the sanctions threat at least until he sees what emerges from the UNSC and whether China is inclined to comply with it fully. Barring North Korea’s trade without China is meaningless.
Our options are limited: we can threaten military action and tightened sanctions, but we can’t really do either unilaterally. Military action should at least require concurrence from South Korea, which is most exposed to the North’s artillery and understandably loathe to go in the military direction. Trade and financial sanctions require China’s cooperation. Threatening not to do business with any country or company that does business with North Korea may sound great, but our reliance on trade with China and Chinese companies precludes actually doing it.
Haley’s most striking rhetoric was her claim that Kim Jong-un is “begging for war.” That is simply untrue. He is deterring the US from a military strike, so far successfully, by demonstrating the North’s own military capabilities. It is far truer that President Trump in his tweets is begging for war, but the adults in the National Security Council and the Defense Department are likely showing him military options and consequences that are unappetizing at best, catastrophic at worst.
President Trump is not entirely to blame for this situation. The history of North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs is strewn with poor choices, both by American presidents and Pyongyang. The Americans have wanted to kick the can down the road. The North Koreans have preferred isolation to integration with the rest of the world. Neither the Americans nor the North Koreans have been willing to make decisions based on the real, but in the 1990s and 2000s long-term, threat of nuclear holocaust.
We are now approaching that long-term future. Haley has ruled out a freeze of North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, in exchange for a freeze on what the North quite reasonably views as hostile US and South Korean military preparations for a pre-emptive strike. The smart money is betting that is the best we are going to get, but Trump’s bluster precludes it. That said, he often backs down, after an effort at distraction. Bluster, distract, cave is his preferred style of (very poor) negotiation. He’d have done a lot better with an upfront assessment of his BATNA, which is what every first-year conflict management student learns at SAIS.
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