The following is an excerpt from an op-ed I wrote explaining why the 2018 midterm election will not have a significant impact on how the Trump administration conducts its diplomatic outreach with North Korea: 

A divided Congress will likely serve as a brake against most of Donald Trump’s policy agenda. But in one critical issue area—the diplomatic efforts to denuclearize North Korea—congressional divisions will not have a significant impact. For better or worse, the executive branch in general and Trump in particular will be able to deal with North Korea as they see fit.

The new Congress is bound to have some effect on Trump’s approach to North Korea, but the impact of the legislative branch should not be overstated. At the end of the day, the executive branch still holds most of the power and control over the U.S.-North Korea diplomatic process. Most of Congress’s impact will therefore be constrained to the margins of U.S. policy.

To read the rest of the article, go to NK News: 

https://​www​.nknews​.org/​2​0​1​8​/​1​1​/​d​e​m​o​c​r​a​t​i​c​-​g​a​i​n​s​-​n​o​r​t​h​-​k​o​r​e​a​n​-​p​a​i​n​s​-​c​o​n​g​r​e​s​s​s​-​l​i​m​i​t​e​d​-​i​m​p​a​c​t​-​o​n​-​d​p​r​k​-​p​o​licy/. 

One hundred years ago Sunday, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the bloodiest war in history ended. In the New Yorker, historian Adam Hochschild writes about the senseless beginning of the war in an “epic chain of blunders, accusations, and ultimatums” and about its senseless end: “In the five weeks since the Germans first requested peace negotiations, half a million casualties had been added to the war’s toll…. Worse yet, British, French, and American commanders made certain that the bloodshed continued at full pitch for six hours after the Armistice had been signed [at 5 a.m., with the news immediately radioed and telephoned to commanders on both sides].”

Cato senior fellow and historian Jim Powell wrote about the blunders and consequences of World War I in his book Wilson’s War: How Woodrow Wilson’s Great Blunder Led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and World War II. He summarized his argument in Cato Policy Report four years ago:

World War I was probably history’s worst catastrophe, and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson was substantially responsible for unintended consequences of the war that played out in Germany and Russia, contributing to the rise of totalitarian regimes and another world war. 

Indeed World War I was a catastrophe, a foolish and unnecessary war, a war of European potentates that both England and the United States could have stayed out of but that became indeed a World War, the Great War. In our own country the war gave us economic planning, conscription, nationalization of the railroads, a sedition act, confiscatory income tax rates, and prohibition. Internationally World War I and its conclusion led directly to the Bolshevik revolution, the rise of National Socialism, World War II, and the Cold War. 

On this weekend as we celebrate the end of this tragedy we should mourn those who went to war, and we should resolve not to risk American lives in the future except when our vital national interests are at stake.

Welcome to the Defense Download! This new round-up is intended to highlight what we at the Cato Institute are keeping tabs on in the world of defense politics every week. The three-to-five trending stories will vary depending on the news cycle, what policymakers are talking about, and will pull from all sides of the political spectrum. If you would like to recieve more frequent updates on what I’m reading, writing, and listening to—you can follow me on Twitter via @CDDorminey. 

1. “Navy can’t build fast enough to reach 355 in time. So how will it get there?,” David Thornton. The Navy’s 30-year shipbuilding plan calls for an increase to a 355-ship force—but it seems that the plan misjudged the shipbuilding industry’s capacity to produce ships on the service’s desired timeline. Simply put, the 355-ship Navy will either require an adjustment to the plan with a slower production model, or the government will have to expand shipbuilding capacity (which is neither cheap nor easy). 
2. “Nuclear modernization programs could face renewed scrutiny in Democrat-controlled House,” Rachel Cohen. When the election on Tuesday flipping the House, it created a valuable opportunity for Democrats to exert influence on the defense budget—including the long-term nuclear modernization program. 
3. Saudi Arabia’s War in Yemen. I want to bring your attention to this is upcoming event hosted by the Cato Institute featuring Rep. Ro Khanna, Kate Kizer from Win Without War, Scott Paul from Oxfam America, and myself—with John Glaser from Cato moderating. Register via the link to join us on December 7th. 

A split Congress could affect Donald Trump’s negotiating strategy vis-à-vis North Korea, but the legislative branch’s impact will mostly come at the margins of U.S. policy. Trump’s control over the two major levers of U.S. pressure on North Korea—sanctions implementation and the military—means that he has significant discretion over negotiations with Pyongyang. By controlling the sources of U.S. pressure, Trump can adjust either and impact negotiations with little concern for what Congress thinks or wants. Congress does have the ability to prevent either extreme outcome of war or peace, but neither of these seem likely given the current conditions on the peninsula.

The two primary ways the new Congress could influence North Korea policy is through investigations and appropriations. House investigations could absorb much of Trump’s time and political capital, making it harder for him to find the time to negotiate with North Korea. Appropriations battles between the White House and Capitol Hill could restrict the former’s latitude in talks with Pyongyang, but any potential restrictions are unlikely to suffocate the president’s efforts. For better or worse, the executive branch in general and Trump in particular will be able to deal with North Korea as they see fit, even with a Democrat-controlled House.

An additional but very uncertain way that the midterms could affect U.S. policy toward North Korea is by creating a window of opportunity for both Trump and Kim Jong Un. If Trump comes away from the midterms thinking his prospects for re-election are grim, then he may push harder to break the current impasse in negotiations in order score a major foreign policy win that he can point to on the campaign trail. Likewise, Kim could take a similar lesson from the midterms and try to maximize diplomatic gains while Trump is still in the White House if Kim thinks a new president would want to return to a “maximum pressure”-like policy. There is no guarantee that the two leaders will have this interpretation, however, and even if they did they may decide that continued engagement is not worthwhile.

Welcome to the Defense Download! This new round-up is intended to highlight what we at the Cato Institute are keeping tabs on in the world of defense politics every week. The three-to-five trending stories will vary depending on the news cycle, what policymakers are talking about, and will pull from all sides of the political spectrum. If you would like to recieve more frequent updates on what I’m reading, writing, and listening to—you can follow me on Twitter via @CDDorminey. 

1. “Bolton Calls National Debt ‘Economic Threat’ to US,” Toluse Olorunnipa. Hot off the presses! National Security Advisor John Bolton calls for significant cuts to discretionary spending in order to get the country back on the path of fiscal sustainability. The new trajectory? Bolton, and the President himself, have called for defense spending to be cut or levelled off in the short-term—a radical change from the administration’s previous two budgets. 
2. “In The Shadow of Reagan’s Legacy, Trump Is Failing,” Alexandra Bell. This article talks about why Reagan negotiated the INF treaty that President Trump is trying to dismantle and juxtaposes Reagan’s belief in arms control as a stabilizing force against the current administration’s actions. 
3. “The Nation Needs A 400-Ship Navy,” Thomas Callender. In the interest of showing the true breadth of this field, I’ve included this new report by the Heritage Foundation that calls for an increase over the adminstration’s current 355-ship plan for the Navy. Building to a 400-ship Navy will require $4–6 billion more annually than is already allocated, during a time of competing priorities and sky-high debt (see first article). 
4. “Mattis wants to boost fighter readiness. Here’s how industry could help,” Valerie Insinna. Last month, Secretary Mattis said that he’d like to get fighter readiness up to 80 percent—this would include all the F‑35, F‑22, F‑16, and F/A‑18 fighter jets. Readiness has been a rallying cry from the Pentagon for several years, but if Mattis intends to put his money where his mouth is, that could mean fewer dollars for new procurement projects in favor of upgrading and sustaining current platforms. 

Power Problems is one year old! In our first year, the podcast has covered a lot of ground, from the death of the Iranian nuclear deal to the defense budget, trade policy and nuclear weapons. Surprising no one, we’ve spent way too much time talking about the Middle East and the curious foreign policy perspectives now emanating from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

But as we head into the second year of our podcast, we’d like to get some feedback from our listeners, so we can give you more of what you enjoy. To help us out, please take a couple of minutes and fill out a quick survey on the podcast. You can find the survey here.

If you’re not already a listener, and want to hear what we’re all about, you can hear myself, Trevor Thrall, and a selection of guests from across the political spectrum discussing top foreign policy issues biweekly. You can find us on iTunes, Stitcher or via the Cato Audio app. 

Thanks for your feedback, and thanks for listening to Power Problems! 

Picking up on Vice President Mike Pence’s speech at the Hudson Institute several weeks ago, Hudson’s Seth Cropsey detailed a plan in the Wall Street Journal on “How to Win a Cold War with Beijing.” At the center of Cropsey’s op-ed is a dramatic increase in the U.S. presence in Asia that would require, among other things, accelerating the current naval buildup, increasing naval patrols, and bolstering naval and Marine forces in Australia. In effect, Cropsey wants to apply the strategy that helped end the former Cold War to America’s growing conflict with China. Quoting Ronald Reagan, Cropsey explains “The objective in this strategic competition [is] ‘We win, they lose.’”

Cropsey’s approach, however, is based on several flawed assumptions, including about the inevitability of conflict between the United States and China. He also places undue faith in the United States’ capacity to face down its rising rival by building more warships and deploying them close to China’s shores.

Implicit in Cropsey’s call for a large naval arms race with China is the assumption that China will back down in the face of it. Convinced of the futility of such competition, Cropsey appears to believe, the Chinese will simply accede to our demands, including on Taiwan. But I have seen no evidence to support such an assumption. The more likely result of an arms race is…a further arms race, as my colleague John Glaser explained earlier this year. Cropsey also ignores the fact that the world is moving into an era of defense-dominance, which puts America’s exquisite, but enormously costly, naval platforms at increased risk from small, smart, and cheap weapons.

The current Sino‑U.S. competition is unlike any we’ve seen – at least in a very long time. The Cold War was, in large part, a zero-sum fight between two diametrically opposed ideologies. However, whereas Soviet Communism and Western Capitalism couldn’t coexist, China’s and America’s current systems can. Or at least might.

If you doubt that, consider that Americans have helped to lift hundreds of millions of Chinese out of desperate poverty over the last quarter century through trade, greatly enriching China in the process. That wasn’t the intention, per se; as Adam Smith famously explained, trade is driven by mutual “self-love.” “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner,” he wrote, “but from their regard to their own interest.” 

And, even now, as President Trump wages a trade war with China, he’s not seeking to end trade between the two countries, but rather to have it on terms more favorable for Americans. Whether he can pull that off is an open question, as Dan Ikenson recently noted, but the end result could be an even greater degree of economic interdependence than already exists.

Contrast that possibility against the reality of U.S.-Soviet trade relations. Actually, you can’t; there was hardly any economic exchange between the two superpowers during much of the Cold War. Most Americans during the darkest days of that standoff wouldn’t have been caught dead buying Soviet-made goods – and not just because they were of dubious quality. At another level, doing so would have been seen as treasonous, literally trading with the enemy.

Cropsey’s plan overlooks another critical difference between the Sino‑U.S. conflict and the Cold War: the Soviet Union was a declining power; China is rising. We can’t compete in the same way today as we did in the 1950s and 60s, engaging in an arms race that eventually grinds the other side into the dirt – or drowns them in the sea. On the current trajectory, I’m sad to say, we’d drown first.

Cropsey fails to account for this possibility by ignoring the United States’ crushing fiscal imbalance. I’m not merely referring to the federal budget deficit, which surpassed $779 billion in the last fiscal year, the highest level since 2012, but also the long-term crisis caused by out-of-control spending on Social Security, and, especially, Medicare. Awkwardly for Cropsey, his call for accelerating an already dramatic expansion of the U.S. Navy appeared on the very day that the Trump administration called for cutbacks in military spending precisely because of the yawning deficit.

By contrast, Cropsey offers no suggestions for what other spending must be cut, and what taxes increased, to cover the cost of his proposed military buildup. Instead, he is essentially assuming that these spending increases will be paid for by additional debt — while ignoring that the very country we are arming against is the largest foreign holder of such debt.

America should not ignore an increasingly assertive China, and that includes calling attention to bad behavior. I thought it noteworthy, for example, that Vice President Pence called out China’s shameful human rights record, including the ongoing persecution of Muslim Uyghurs. The crackdown on peaceful political dissent in also troubling. More broadly, U.S. policymakers must consider novel approaches to territorial disputes in the South and East China Seas without privileging any one claimant. Indeed, Washington should always take account of the perspective of other countries in the region. Notably, none are calling for the kind of military confrontation that Cropsey favors — and a number, including most recently Japan, are doing the opposite by actively exploring deeper trade and diplomatic ties with Beijing.

Closer to home, it is in our interest to develop policies and procedures that protect intellectual property and our sprawling cyber infrastructure. This may mean considering what regulations can and should be imposed on Americans that would like to do business in China, or with Chinese firms. I would prefer, however, that Americans rethink how they safeguard their precious assets without politicians in Washington, DC, having to tell them to do so.

A long-term strategy for Sino-US relations should be forward looking, and based on present realities, not on outdated thinking and false assumptions. Most importantly, the United States should work with China to find diplomatic solutions to those issues that could lead to war (including the toughest issue of all — Taiwan). We should seek solutions that advance U.S. interests, but also contribute to long-term peace and stability in the region.

The alternative to a win-win is that we both lose.

p.s. If you want to hear more on U.S.-China relations, and reactions to the Pence speech, check out my conversation with Bryan McGrath (@ConsWahoo) and Melanie Marlowe (@profmarlowe) at “Net Assessment,” War on the Rocks’ newest podcast.

Thanks to Travis Evans for his help with this post.