Ever since President Trump appointed John Bolton to be the new national security advisor last week, a torrent of commentary has poured forth about the hawkish Fox News pundit and American Enterprise Institute senior fellow, who once served as United Nations Ambassador for 18 months in the George W. Bush administration. Two pieces published today, however, stand out for their precision and insight. 

The first is by The Atlantic’s Peter Beinart, whose central argument is that Bolton is not the learned foreign policy scholar many believe him to be. While Bolton certainly has years of experience, it hasn’t been of the right kind. Bolton’s “militancy,” his “incessant, almost casual, advocacy of war,” Beinart argues, is positively “Trumpian: The less evidence you have, the more certain you sound.”

Bolton’s analysis and prognostications — particularly about Iraq, Iran, and North Korea — have so frequently been proven wrong by events that it can be tedious to lay it all out. Beinart does a good job of it, but his real insight is to suggest a possible explanation for why Bolton has been so extremely hawkish, and wrong, for so long. 

[I]f Kissinger is right that “[high] office teaches decision making, not substance” and that it “consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it,” then the narrow professional experience through which Bolton has amassed his intellectual capital matters a great deal. He has never served in the military. He has never studied another region of the world, or another period of history, at the graduate level. He has spent his entire adult life in the interlocking world of hawkish think tanks, Washington law firms, Republican politics, and the right-wing media. And he manifests that narrowness in the smugly insular worldview he brings to his new job.

Over the past two decades, Bolton has written dozens of columns and essays, often for the flagship publications of the American right. To read them is to enter a cocoon. His writing is filled with assertions—about the purity of America’s intentions, the motivations of its adversaries, the uselessness of diplomacy, and the efficacy of war—for which he offers either feeble evidence or no evidence at all.

Do read the whole thing.

The second must-read on Bolton’s appointment comes from Josh Shifrinson, assistant professor of international affairs with the Bush School of Government at Texas A&M University. In the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog, Shifrinson argues that an extremist like Bolton can rise to the top of television punditry, and now to immense power as the president’s right-hand man on all things national security, only because of America’s peculiar place atop the international system. The unusual outsize power of the United States in the post-Cold War era has several implications for foreign policy.

First, it is a permissive environment for foreign policy activism in that there are few external constraints on the exercise of U.S. might. We face fewer negative consequences for strategic blunders and foolish wars, compared at least to states that face retaliation from peer competitors.

Second, this peculiar position of U.S. dominance means that domestic politics and the idiosyncrasies of individual leaders matter more for foreign policy than it otherwise would amid a more equal balance of power. “All this means sage leadership that screens policy ideas is especially important,” Shifrinson writes. “With an inexperienced leader like Trump in the Oval Office, Bolton’s views can gain traction partly because America still reigns as the sole superpower.”

Third, while other powers, like China, are beginning to compete with the U.S. in the economic and diplomatic spheres, America still reigns supreme in the miltiary arena. Using force and projecting power are our comparative advantage, and so Washington’s incentive is to play to this strength, wisely or not.

Both Beinart and Shifrinson illustrate just how hazardous it is to have a man like Bolton in the Oval Office advising a man like Trump. If his history of erroneous analysis and impulsive support for elective wars is any guide, Americans should be bracing for a bumpy remainder to the Trump presidency. 

President Trump’s appointment of Gina Haspel as the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency has revived memories of the abuses the CIA committed during George W. Bush’s administration. The appointment is indeed deeply troubling, since Haspel ran one of the Agency’s infamous overseas “black sites” that featured “enhanced interrogation” techniques (a cynical euphemism for torture). But as I point out in a new National Interest Online article, Haspel’s conduct is the symptom of a much deeper problem. Both during the Cold War and the war on terror, too many U.S. officials have succumbed to the temptation to combat evil behavior with evil behavior. In the process, they have undermined and imperiled fundamental American values.

There is no question that communist powers and radical Islamic terrorists are morally odious adversaries. The United States rightly condemned Moscow’s subjugation of Eastern Europe and the Kremlin’s global subversion campaigns against other societies. But Washington’s conduct was hardly exemplary, and as the Cold War continued, U.S. behavior became increasingly questionable. Especially shameful were those cases in which Washington subverted and overthrew democratic governments to help install “friendly dictators.” There is now indisputable evidence that the United States was involved in such disreputable moves against elected governments in Iran, Guatemala, Chile, and other countries. Indeed, U.S. leaders seemed to prefer pliable autocrats to unpredictable pluralistic systems. When General Chun Doo-hwan overthrew an embryonic democratic government in South Korea, John Wickham, the commander of U.S. forces in that country, excused the seizure of power, saying that South Koreans were “lemming-like” and needed a strong leader.

Indeed, in the name of waging the Cold War, U.S. officials flirted with utterly horrific options. During the Kennedy administration, the CIA concocted a scheme to stage false flag attacks, including blowing up civilian airliners, as a phony justification to invade Cuba and oust Fidel Castro. Fortunately, the White House rejected the scheme, but that supposedly ethical officials could even consider murdering innocent Americans as a geopolitical pretext illustrated just how much U.S. policymakers were beginning to emulate their immoral communist counterparts.

The casual willingness to cut moral corners is evident in the war on terror as well. In addition to the CIA’s own use of torture, Washington embraced the practice of rendition, whereby the United States sent accused terrorists to cooperative dictatorships renowned for using torture techniques that made even the U.S. conduct look mild. Those governments included Saudi Arabia’s brutal theocratic autocracy, Hosni Mubarak’s dictatorship in Egypt, and Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. Outsourcing torture in that fashion, however, did nothing to dilute America’s responsibility for the resulting egregious human rights violations.

Washington’s overseas military conduct in the war on terror is equally troubling. The awful destruction that U.S. forces have visited on Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and turned millions of others into destitute refugees. In addition to the needless carnage that the U.S. military has inflicted directly, the United States is an active accomplice in Saudi Arabia’s atrocity-filled war in Yemen.

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche expressed the cautionary admonition: “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.” Too often, U.S. leaders have ignored that warning. In doing so, they have established disturbing, sometimes horrifying, precedents that betray the basic values of a liberal democracy.

On Tuesday, a vote in the Senate sought to curtail America’s participation in the destruction of Yemen. This vote was the culmination of months of dedicated work by those involved in this issue, and the resolution failed by only a few votes. It forced a debate on the topic and added to international momentum to resolve the conflict peacefully. 

On Thursday, the Trump administration notified Congress of three new arms sales to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia—the country that has repeatedly tossed aside the laws of armed conflict to indiscriminately target cities and civilian populations. Nevertheless it seems that America will remain the kingdom’s largest weapons supplier. 

This round includes 6,600 TOW missiles, $300 million worth of repairs to their Abrams tanks and other surface vehicles, and $106 million for helicopter maintenance. These deals are worth $630 million total. 

Restricting arms sales like these would lessen America’s involvement in the war and force Saudi Arabia to either find other suppliers or rethink the current course of action.

For more on this issue, check out our latest in DefenseOne on the events this week. Interested in American weapons exports and the intersection of foreign policy more generally? Read our latest Policy Analysis, “Risky Business: The Role of Arms Sales in U.S. Foreign Policy.” 

Americans who voted for Donald Trump believing he would be disinclined to start new wars should be puzzled by his decision to tap John Bolton as his third national security adviser. The rest of us should be concerned.

Bolton has been one of the most reliably hawkish voices in American politics in recent memory. In 2015, he openly called for launching a war against Iran. Earlier this year, he argued that the United States should initiate a war against North Korea. His faith in the utility of force, and his general disdain for diplomacy, is legendary — and apparently hasn’t been shaken by the wars of the recent past.

Most Americans — 67 percent in a recent poll — believe that the Iraq war failed to advance — or, worse, undermined — American security. Bolton appears to agree with the mere 22 percent of Americans who think that that war made things better. 

Back in 2013, Donald Trump tweeted: 

All former Bush administration officials should have zero standing on Syria. Iraq was a waste of blood & treasure.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 5, 2013

(H/T Vox’s Dara Lind)

One has to wonder: what changed his mind?

In fairness, H.R. McMaster was no dove. He appears to have been a decisive voice in convincing President Trump to reverse himself on Afghanistan. But McMaster’s cerebral nature simply doesn’t compare to Bolton’s made-for-Fox News bellicosity — which may explain why Trump tired of the three-star general. 

The circle of men and women who advise a president on foreign policy is never large. With Mike Pompeo replacing Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State (pending Senate confirmation, which isn’t assured), Secretary of Defense James Mattis may be the only person with the stature to counteract the vocal and growing chorus who can be expected to feed President Trump’s worst instincts.

Quite rightly, President Donald Trump and his Administration are targeting the transgressions of China against US intellectual property rights in their unfolding trade strategy. But why not use the WTO rules that offer a real remedy for the United States without resorting to illegal unilateral action outside the WTO?

Seventeen years after China joined the WTO, China still falls considerably short of fulfilling its WTO obligations to protect intellectual property. About 70 percent of the software in use in China, valued at nearly $8.7 billion, is pirated. The annual cost to the US economy worldwide from pirated software, counterfeit goods, and the theft of trade secrets could be as high as $600 billion, with China at the top of the IP infringement list. China is the source of 87 percent of the counterfeit goods seized upon entry into the United States.

One possible response by the United States is the one the Trump Administration seems to be taking: slapping billions of dollars of tariffs on imports of more than 100 Chinese products through unilateral trade action. Given its protectionist predilections, taking this approach is surely tempting to the Trump Administration. Doing so will, however, harm American workers, businesses, and consumers, and contribute to further turmoil in the global economy.

The results will likely include retaliation by China against the goods and services of American companies and workers; lawful economic sanctions imposed by China on American exports to China after the US lost to China in WTO cases; the hidden tax of higher prices for American consumers; less competitiveness in the US market and in other markets for American companies that depend on Chinese imports as intermediate goods in production; and doubtless still more American and global economic landmines from the downward spiral of tit-for-tat in international trade confrontations.

These tariffs are not only self-defeating and counter-productive; they are also illegal under international law. Where an international dispute falls within the scope of coverage of the WTO treaty, taking unilateral action without first going to WTO dispute settlement for a legal ruling on whether there is a WTO violation is, in and of itself, a violation of the treaty. The WTO treaty establishes mandatory jurisdiction for the WTO dispute settlement system for all treaty-related disputes between and among WTO Members. The WTO Appellate Body has explained, “Article 23.1 of the (WTO Dispute Settlement Understanding) imposes a general obligation to redress a violation of obligations or other nullification or impairment of benefits under the covered agreements only by recourse to the rules and procedures of the DSU, and not through unilateral action.”

Thus, the United States is not permitted by the international rules to which it has long since agreed to be the judge and the jury in its own case. Imposing tariffs on Chinese products without first obtaining a WTO ruling that Chinese actions are inconsistent with China’s WTO obligations is a clear violation by the United States of its WTO obligations to China – as WTO jurists will doubtless rule when China responds to the tariffs by challenging the tariffs in the WTO.

Such a legal loss by the United States, with all its unforeseeable economic and geopolitical consequences, can be avoided while still confronting Chinese IP violations effectively. Before resorting to unilateral action outside the WTO and in violation of international law, the United States should take a closer look at the substantial rights it enjoys under the WTO treaty for protecting US intellectual property against abuse.

Potential remedies in the WTO exist and should not be ignored. These remedies can be enforced through the pressure of WTO economic sanctions. WTO rules do not yet cover all the irritants that must be addressed in US-China trade relations. Even so, instead of just concluding that there are no adequate remedies under WTO rules to help stop IP infringement, the United States should first try to use the remedies in rules we have already negotiated that bind China along with all other WTO Members.

A number of these rules have not yet been tested against China or any other country – which is not proof they will not work. Generally, when tried for the first time, WTO rules have been found to work, and, generally, when China has been found to be acting inconsistently with its WTO obligations, it has complied with WTO rulings. The actual extent of Chinese compliance with WTO judgments can be questioned; in some instances it is seen by some as only “paper compliance.” But whether any one WTO rule can in fact be enforced cannot be known if no WTO Member bothers to try to enforce it.

The WTO rules in the WTO Agreement on the Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights – the so-called TRIPS Agreement – are unique among WTO rules because they impose affirmative obligations. Yet, this affirmative aspect of WTO intellectual property rules has been largely unexplored in WTO dispute settlement. In particular, WTO Members have so far refrained from challenging other WTO Members for failing to enforce intellectual property rights.

On enforcement, Article 41.1 of the TRIPS Agreement imposes an affirmative obligation on all WTO Members: “Members shall ensure that enforcement procedures… are available under their law so as to permit effective action against any act of infringement of intellectual property rights covered by this Agreement, including expeditious remedies to prevent infringements and remedies which constitute a deterrent to further infringements. These procedures shall be applied in such a manner as to avoid the creation of barriers to legitimate trade and to provide for safeguards against their abuse.”

Note that this “shall” be done by all WTO Members; it is mandatory for compliance with their WTO obligations. And yet what does this obligation mean by requiring that effective actions against infringements must be “available”? Is this obligation fulfilled by having sound laws on the books, as is generally the case with China? Or must those laws also be enforced effectively in practice, which is often not the case with China?

The Appellate Body has said that “making something available means making it ‘obtainable,’ putting it ‘within one’s reach’ and ‘at one’s disposal’ in a way that has sufficient form or efficacy.” Thus, simply having a law on the books is not enough. That law must have real force in the real world of commerce. This ruling by the Appellate Body related to the use of the word “available” in Article 42 of the TRIPS Agreement and to a legal claim seeking fair and equitable access to civil judicial procedures. Yet the same reasoning applies equally to the enforcement of substantive rights under Article 41.

In the past, the United States has challenged certain parts of the overall Chinese legal system for intellectual property protection – and successfully – in WTO dispute settlement. Despite its overall concerns about enforcement by China of US intellectual property rights, the United States has not, however, challenged the Chinese system as a whole in the WTO. Instead of indulging in the illegality of unilateral tariffs outside the legal framework of the WTO, the Trump Administration should initiate a comprehensive legal challenge in the WTO, not merely, as before, to the bits and pieces of particular Chinese IP enforcement, but rather to the entirety of the Chinese IP enforcement system.

To be sure, a systemic challenge by the United States to the application of all China’s inadequate measures relating to intellectual property protection would put the WTO dispute settlement system to a test. It would, what’s more, put both China and the United States to the test of their commitment to the WTO and, especially, to a rules-based world trading system.

As Trump’s trade lawyers will hasten to say, a systemic IP case against China in the WTO would also involve a perhaps unprecedented amount of fact-gathering. It would necessitate an outpouring of voluminous legal pleadings. It would, furthermore, force the WTO Members and the WTO jurists to face some fundamental questions about the rules-based trading system. Yet it could also provide the basis for fashioning a legal remedy that would in the end be mutually acceptable to both countries, and could therefore help prevent commercial conflict and reduce a significant obstacle to mutually beneficial US-China relations.

Going outside the WTO to try to resolve this trade dispute will undermine the WTO and thereby ultimately undermine US trade in goods and services – not to mention the protection of US intellectual property rights – throughout the world. Far better for the United States to play by the rules within the WTO – not least because it was the United States that insisted the most on having those rules when they were negotiated. Far better, too, for China to have its compliance with its WTO obligations judged by impartial and objective WTO jurists than by Donald Trump.

A positive solution should be sought by the Trump Administration through dispute resolution in the WTO over the systemic shortcomings of Chinese intellectual property protection before plunging into the commercial black hole of unilateral trade action.

As was widely expected, on Sunday Vladimir Putin was once again reinstalled (reconfirmed, re-enthroned) in the Kremlin. The term “elected” cannot be used in this case since nothing that happened on March 18, 2018, or in the months leading to this date, qualifies for the internationally recognized basic standards of the term “election.” 

In full control of the Kremlin for more than 18 years, Putin has already been at the top of the Russian state longer than any other Russian or Soviet leader in the last century—including Leonid Brezhnev—and is now left to compete only with the three-decade reign of Joseph Stalin.

The official numbers of the Central Electoral Commission (CEC) gave Putin 76.7% of the vote with a turnout of 67.5%, making up almost 52% of Russia’s electorate. According to the CEC, the official number of people who voted for Putin was 56.4 million. However, Sergei Shpilkin, the renowned expert in electoral statistics, has estimated that ballot stuffing this year amounted to at least 10 million. In each of the three previous cases of “presidential elections” (in 2004, 2008, 2012) Shpilkin and his colleagues calculated the number of added (falsified) votes at between 8.8 and 14.6 million. 

Whatever the actual level of Putin’s public support, the official numbers provide Putin with a level of legitimacy that Russian presidents never had before. The real question that now arises is how he is going to use it.

The general consensus is that Putin’s policy on the domestic front would be a still further tightening of his grip on the last remnants of civil society, a further destruction of the already almost-fully-destroyed rule of law, meager—if any—meaningful economic reforms, and definitely a new level of ideologization of Russian society based on anti-liberal, conservative, Orthodox religious values. Russia’s level of political rights and civil liberties in previous years has been sliding down to non-free status. Now its status is just one notch above the very bottom in Freedom House’s political freedom index, meaning that it is close to the level of the totalitarian regimes of Cuba and North Korea. Given Putin’s persistence and Russia’s rapid political deterioration, it is rather hard not to expect that Russia will soon sink to the lowest level in the political freedom index.

As for Putin’s possible foreign policy in the coming years, we can get a hint of it based on a number of his recent statements, comments, and interviews. It appears that Putin’s traditional interest in disturbing Russia’s immediate neighbors and grabbing pieces of land in Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine has been visibly redirected towards Belarus, since Mr. Lukashenko’s dictatorship—lacking any serious foreign allies except for Russia—seems to be particularly vulnerable to absorption. In addition, the Russian “czar” has started to look for more ambitious targets beyond the borders of the former Soviet republics. Recently, his attention has been directed towards his key adversary—the United States—and the most irritating part for him within the United States, its democratic political system. In the documentary movie “The World Order, 2018,” which was prepared by the Kremlin propaganda team before the March presidential vote, Putin firmly articulated his two approaches to the United States: to be emphatically positive towards president Trump and to show strong “disappointment with the unpredictable [democratic] political system” of the United States.

Otherwise, in his interview with NBC anchor Megan Kelly, Putin appeared even more decisive—by naming (unprecedentedly) five times the most crucial problem for him and his key partner (president Trump): namely, the United States political system and the United States Congress. He blamed Congress for all of America’s alleged crimes, such as intervention into Russian internal affairs, different accusations of Russia, proclaiming Russia as an enemy, and the introduction of sanctions against Russia—something that Putin has never done before. It remains to be seen what particular instruments he is ready to apply towards this enemy—intervention into congressional elections this Autumn, cyber-attacks, propaganda, blackmail, or otherwise. But having seen Putin’s approach for years, it is hard not to foresee that one of the main targets of his aggressive foreign policy—either open, or clandestine, or both—in the coming years is going to be the democratic political system of the United States, with the United States Congress at its center.

On the unhappy 15th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War, the Charles Koch Institute’s William Ruger and Boston University’s Andrew Bacevich offer important and timely op eds.

Writing in the New York Times, Ruger sees Iraq as “just the worst in a string of failures” of U.S. foreign policy in the past quarter century, a range of missions that have cost nearly 7,000 American troops killed, tens of thousands wounded, and trillions of dollars spent, with precious little to show for it. “Underlying all of these failures,” Ruger writes, “is the view, endorsed by both parties, that we need an active military presence around the globe to shape what happens almost everywhere.” He calls for an “alternate approach to the United States’ role in the world,” a “constructive but realistic mind-set [that] would put our safety first while expanding America’s opportunities to engage productively with the world.”

Bacevich takes the occasion of this sad anniversary to comment on the disconnect between the American people and the elites who sold the war. He attributes Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 election to the “blood sacrifice vote” — the “communities that paid a high price for the Iraq War in terms of casualties.” Hillary Clinton prevailed among those who preferred to let “someone else’s sons and daughters do the fighting.” It is the sort of scathing critique that Bacevich has come to be known for, but it is no less accurate or insightful for having been written before.

Trump voters, Bacevich posits, supported him, despite the fact that they suspected his “America First” campaign to be “all but devoid of substantive content”:

because Trump said aloud what they themselves knew: that the Iraq War had been [a] monumental error for which they, and pointedly not members of the political elite, had paid dearly. In short, a vote for Trump offered them a way to express their disdain for establishment politicians whose dishonesty they considered far more odious than Trump’s own pronounced tendency to shave the truth.

I’ve written before of how the yawning gap between the foreign policy elite and the people who fight the wars and pay the bills paved the way for a person like Donald Trump to win the presidency (see especially here and here). But I do think it worthwhile to dwell, for a moment, on Iraq as a particularly important step along the process that turned that gap into a chasm.

We should also recall the arguments of those who actually made the case against war in 2002 and 2003. Donald Trump wasn’t one of them. But there was the advertisement in the New York Times paid for and signed by 33 respected academics. They concluded that the Bush administration had not presented conclusive evidence, and that a war against Iraq lacked sufficient justification. They disputed claims that the war would end quickly. “Even if we win easily,” they said, “we have no plausible exit strategy.” The statement envisioned a long-term U.S. presence because Iraq was “a deeply divided society” and would take “many years to create a viable state.” Lastly, the signatories of the New York Times advertisement saw the war in Iraq as a dangerous distraction from the more urgent concern: al Qaeda and transnational terrorism.

Within the Beltway, most foreign policy experts either endorsed Bush’s war, or kept their silence. Scholars at the Cato Institute, however, were particularly active in their opposition. Cato’s Chairman, William Niskanen, came forward with one of the earliest arguments against war with Iraq, in December 2001, in a debate at the institute with former CIA Director James Woolsey, and in a follow-up article in the Chicago Sun-Times under the headline “U.S. Should Refrain from Attacking Iraq.”

Other Cato scholars joined in. Ted Galen Carpenter challenged the war boosters’ optimistic predictions of a short and cheap engagement. “The inevitable U.S. military victory,” Carpenter predicted, would “mark the start of a new round of headaches.” “Iraq [is] a fissiparous amalgam of Sunnis, separatist Shiites and Kurds,” noted Gene Healy in the magazine Liberty. “Keeping the country together will require a strong hand and threatens to make U.S. servicemen walking targets for discontented radicals.”

In December 2002, Cato published a full-length study making the case against war. Authors Ivan Eland and Bernard Gourley concluded:

The United States deterred and contained a rival superpower, which had thousands of nuclear warheads, for 40 years; America can certainly continue to successfully deter and contain a relatively small, relatively poor nation until its leader dies or is deposed. An unprovoked attack on another sovereign state does not square with—and actually undermines—the principles of a constitutional republic.

This isn’t entirely self-serving. I joined Cato in early February 2003; by then, the die was pretty much cast. But I did manage to fire off one warning before the war started. And it still isn’t too late to learn the proper lessons from the Iraq War, and the problems with primacy, the underlying the foreign policy philosophy that gives rise to Iraq-type wars.