Korea, 2017 and 1953

A new post on the threat of nuclear war appears here.

Did General McMaster Pass his own Test?

When General  H.R. McMaster replaced General Ray Flynn as National Security Adviser just a few weeks into the Trump Administration, commentators made much of the book he had written as a doctoral candidate 20 years ago, Dereliction of Duty, and what it boded for his tenure.  Published in 1998, that book argued that the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the mid-1960s had failed to give Lyndon Johnson their honest opinion of what was needed to win the Vietnam War, and that that had led to catastrophe.  As it happens, I was finishing my own book on the origins of the Vietnam War, American Tragedy, at that very moment, and I did not see what McMaster had in the same sources.  The problem, I thought, was not that the Generals didn’t tell President Johnson what they thought, it was that neither the military nor the civilians had a realistic idea of how to win the war.  No one, however, could argue with the principle that he was advocating: that it was essential for military leaders to give their civilian superiors honest and sound military advice.

Unfortunately, it is not clear that General McMaster, Secretary of Defense (and retired general) James Mattis, and Joint Chiefs’ Chairman General Joseph Dunford—by law the President’s principal military adviser—managed to pass that test during the crisis over chemical weapons in Syria.  Ironically, their retaliatory strike and the ways in which they have defended it are extremely reminiscent of one of the most unfortunate episodes of the Vietnam era, the first major air strike on North Vietnam in the wake of the Tonkin Gulf incident in early August 1964.

On August 2, 1964, American destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf were attacked by North Vietnamese p. t. boats, who it turned out were acting without authorization from higher authority.  Officially the destroyers were making a routine patrol; in actual fact they were coordinating with a South Vietnamese paramilitary strike against the North, partly to test North Vietnamese radar.  Such attacks had been taking place since early that year, and the Joint Chiefs had anticipated that they might lead to North Vietnamese retaliation and full-scale American involvement in the Vietnam War. Johnson was now preparing for his re-election campaign against hawkish Barry Goldwater, who had already been nominated, and his National Security team had already been waiting for some time for a pretext to introduce a Congressional resolution authorizing the use of military force in Southeast Asia.  In the days after the attack Johnson authorized another South Vietnamese operation against the North and another patrol for August 4, and on the morning of that day, he discussed possible retaliation against the North with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.

The patrol on the evening of August 4, it was later established, did not encounter any North Vietnamese opposition, but at least one destroyer initially reported sonar contacts suggesting that it had.  McNamara and Johnson swung into action without waiting to make sure what had happened, sending an air strike against the base from which the August 2 PT boats had come.  Johnson asked for his resolution authorizing war, and received nearly unanimous support from the House and Senate.  The US took a giant step towards the war that Johnson and McNamara had already anticipated after the election.  In the first week of March 1965 it began in earnest.

We must now face the possibility that the Syrian crisis, like the Tonkin Gulf strike, is based upon misinformation.  Professor Ted Postol of MIT, a hard boiled skeptic for whom I have great respect, has gone on record that the photographic evidence we have does not support the idea that the gas was dropped from a plane. It does not seem at this point at least that the Administration’s leaders see the strike as a step towards a larger war.  But what is most striking is the very similar way that the two strikes have been justified: as “signals” designed to intimidate and deter the enemy from undertaking further hostile acts.  

The idea of using military force to signal one’s intentions, and thereby to affect the behavior of adversaries without resorting to full-scale war, was elaborated by an economist, Thomas Schelling, in his book Arms and Influence, which appeared less than two years after the Tonkin Gulf incidents.  This was the era of the Cold War, when American strategists were searching for alternative strategies to an all-out nuclear exchange, and Schelling claimed to have found one. Both the Cuban missile crisis and that retaliatory attack after the Tonkin Gulf incidents, he argued, were “signals” that had persuaded, and might persuade, adversaries not to challenge American power.  He praised the quarantine of Cuba in 1962 and the 1964 bombing as “proportional” moves that would allow an adversary to rethink his strategy without risking all-out war.  That was music to the ears of American policymakers—but unfortunately, we now know, it did not reflect the facts of those cases.

The reason that Nikita Khrushchev decided to remove his missiles from Cuba, we now know, was that he could not stop the American invasion of Cuba that would have begun within just a few days if he did not—nor could he risk nuclear war against an overwhelmingly superior United States.  We have also learned that the effect of the Tonkin Gulf strike on the North Vietnamese was disastrous.  Until it occurred, Ho Chi Minh—the most diplomatic of all the Communist leaders of the twentieth century—had hoped to work out a deal with Washington that would have avoided war.  But Ho and his government knew what the American people did not—that the second attack for which we had retaliated had not taken place—and he decided, correctly, that the Americans were determined upon war, and that he would therefore give it to him.  The strike did not in the least deter Ho: it encouraged him.  With the help of Chinese and Russian allies, he eventually prevailed.

It now turns out that the Trump Administration’s decision to warn the Russian government about our impending strike turned it into a completely symbolic act.  The Russians in turn warned the Syrians, who evacuated the airfield, from which they have now resumed conventional attacks.  The Russians have also reaffirmed their solidarity with the Assad regime and stopped the exchange of information with the US government about military moves.  Although Assad may avoid further chemical attacks, the incident will do nothing to change the basic course of the conflict in Syria.  It will only put more pressure on the Administration to take further action as Assad continues to consolidate his power against the rebels.  And indeed, high officials are already talking as if Assad must be removed--something they lack the means to make happen.

In 2017 as in 1964, the foreign policy establishment has applauded the Administration’s use of force to show American resolve.  This in my opinion is the kind of illusory gain that military leaders should warn civilians against.  President Obama refused to take similar action against Syria because he did not believe American military power could affect the situation for the better.  With Russia firmly behind Syria, that situation remains unchanged.  Symbolic attacks only foster the illusion of American power—the illusion that led us to the greatest foreign policy tragedy of the twentieth century in Vietnam.

A note to radio listeners and New York Times readers!

Those of you arriving here thanks to the New York Times story on Bannon or to Chris Lydon on radioopensource.org will be particularly interested in this post.  Note that it was published in December 2015. It was written months earlier, well before the Trump campaign took off--but at this moment I'm inclined to stand by the conclusions.

Other readers will enjoy the interview that is now available at radioopensource.org.

Democracy at work

I had been planning this piece all week but this morning, reading the New York Times, I found that an author and former Congressional staffer named Steven Waldman had beaten me to it.  I shall nonetheless go ahead as I had planned.  This morning Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell invoked the "nuclear option" to halt the Democratic filibuster against Justice Gorsuch. I am glad that he took this step towards a more functioning American democracy, and I hope that filibusters on legislation can be eliminated as well.

There are more similarities between today's liberals and conservatives than either side would like to admit, and one of them is an almost complete disregard for process and a devotion to desired results, by whatever means secured.  Democrats complained about filibusters in the Obama years; now they have adopted one to fight the nomination of a fully qualified judge.  But for whatever reason, I think differently.  Filibusters have always been wrong, and they remain wrong.  We will be better off without them--in today's climate, MUCH better off.

The filibuster has a venerable history, but it is truly depressing that in the last twenty years it has become more important than ever before.  During the first two-thirds of the twentieth century it was nearly always used for the same purpose: to prevent effective civil rights legislation from securing the rights of black Americans, especially the right not to be lynched with impunity in the former Confederate states.  Eventually a bipartisan consensus in the northern states allowed the Senate to overcome filibusters against a moderate civil rights bill in 1960, and another far more radical bill in 1964.  In those days it took 2/3 of those Senators present and voting to stop debate and bring a bill to a vote.  Later the required number was cut to 60 votes, or 3/5.

A number of authorities have pointed out that the practice of requiring a super-majority appears to be unconstitutional on its face.  The Constitution specifies that 2/3 majorities in the Senate will be required to ratify treaties, to convict federal officials impeached by the House, and to pass a Constitutional amendment.  These provisions clearly imply that a simple majority should suffice to pass any other legislation or to confirm appointments.  It is very interesting that for so much of our history, Senators accepted filibusters only as a regional weapon against one particular kind of legislation.  As Waldman pointed out in his piece today, while Republicans certainly abominated a great deal of New Deal legislation--including the Social Security Act--they never filibustered a New Deal measure.  Democrats never used filibusters against Republican Supreme Court nominees either, voting two Nixon choices down in 1969-70 by actual majorities, and allowing the confirmation of Clarence Thomas by a very narrow margin.

But by the late  1990s, the Republicans were using the threat of filibusters to kill legislation.  That tactic had catastrophic consequences during the first two years of the Obama Administration.  Had it not been for the unified Republican threat, the Affordable Care Act would have included a full-scale public option such as the House of Representatives passed.  As it was, the defection of just a couple of Democrats was enough to kill it in the Senate.  We would also have passed comprehensive immigration reform, which might easily have kept Donald Trump well away from the White House.  Had our democracy not lost the ability to pass legislation to solve problems, the political class might have retained the confidence of the country. It didn't.

As I have written repeatedly and at length, from 2009 through 2016 Republicans used every means at hand--led by the threat of filibusters--to prevent Barack Obama from passing any legislation.  I was disturbed when the Democrats in the Senate decided that their duty now required them to do the same.  As long as our basic freedoms are preserved--and I do not believe at this point that they are seriously threatened--then a bad government is preferable to none at all.  Judge Gorsuch is fully qualified and personally distinguished.  He will also make a far better justice than most of the men and women that President Trump might appoint.   The Democrats feel that Merritt Garland should be on the court, but it is not the filibuster that kept him off.  The Republicans now control the Senate. The Democrats will have to undo that condition at the ballot box.  To do that they will have to find ways to appeal to the many millions of Red State Americans who have written them off.

Beginning with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, liberals have relied more and more on the federal courts to secure their objectives.  That was how state legislatures were forced to draw electoral districts based upon population, how prayers were banned from schools,  how criminal justice was reformed in key ways, how abortion was legalized, how the death penalty was temporarily abolished in the 1960s, and how interracial and gay marriage were legalized throughout the land.  Inevitably the Republican Party responded by using the courts to achieve their objectives, including the creation of a new individual right to bear arms and the effective end of laws regulating campaign contributions.  This has been catastrophic for American democracy, not least because some of those decisions have never been accepted by large numbers of Americans.  Indeed, one could argue that the Republican Party today is a coalition of Americans opposed to the spirit of Brown v. Board of Education, Americans opposed to Roe V. Wade, and Americans opposed to limits on campaign spending.   Had some of these issues been decided by the political branches I suspect American democracy will look very different.

Having spent several weeks studying and writing about Tocqueville a few months ago, I know how many of the requirements of effective democracy we lack.  We lack any real consensus on many major issues, our people no longer have extensive experience managing their local affairs, and they do not feel anything like the dedication to our institutions that they did for most of the first 200 yars of the Republic.  Yet I will not give up on making our institutions work again. That can only happen, in my opinion, if the legislative process can solve real problems.  It will not be able to do so in the face of routine Senate filibusters, or reflex opposition by either party to the Supreme Court nominations of Presidents on the other side.  Al Smith liked to say that the only cure for the ills of democracy was more democracy, and I still agree.

Our new era

For the last couple of weeks I have been carrying out an old ambition, to read a 40-year old book by Ernst Nolte, a German historian about Germany and the Cold War.  That historian, a most ambitious if sometimes erratic thinker, begins his tome with more than 150 pages putting the emergence of both the United States and the USSR in the whole context of modern western history.  He also spends some time on the origins of Fascism, about which he had written another book.  Although I do not always agree with his judgments, he gives the kind of extraordinary tour d'horizon that was expected of a great historian during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century.  I cannot read the book today without an acute sense that that whole tradition is dead.  But more importantly, the world that it described has also died.  My own adult lifetime, spanning the last half-century, has seen the end of an era in which western peoples and states counted on the political arena to create a better world.  And the frightening consequences of that era are all over today's news, and may well dominate the news for the rest of my life.

The new era may be said to have begun in the late 18th century with the American and French Revolutions.  Those two fraternal twin children of the Enlightenment claimed to use reason and human science to design a fairer and better world.  Both promulgated declarations of rights and set up some kind of democracy.  The American experiment progressed rather steadily, while the French one immediately emerged as the first great example of the dangers of Enlightenment principles, which could provide excellent excuses for terror and dictatorship.  The crisis of the late 18th century actually led to a swing away from democratic principles in Britain and much of Europe, but they steadily gained ground during the 19th century.  But the intellectual and political world were transformed starting around 1900 by the rise of socialism, the progressive reaction to the consequences of industrialization in the US and elsewhere, and then, the catastrophe of the First World War.

The Communist victory in Russia resulted in large part from the First World War, establishing a theoretically Utopian state within one of the largest countries on earth.  Five years later, Fascism--to some extent a response to Communism--took over in Italy, and in 1933 Hitler came to power in Germany.  All three of these new regimes rejected democracy as it evolved in the West and became single-party states. While Mussolini's actual impact on Italy was relatively modest until the Second World War, both Stalin and Hitler embarked upon extraordinary redesigns of their societies, economy and culture, based on very specific visions of a great future to come.  They also vastly strengthened their militaries.

Yet in the long run the most important impact of Communism and Fascism was the response in the West, and particularly in the United States.  Franklin Roosevelt also recognized the need to transform the role of the state, and to redesign the American economy and society, albeit within the framework of American democracy.  He came into office proclaiming that false values--a devotion to money above all else--had led the United States into Depression.  He held out the vision of an America that would restrict the dangerous excesses of capitalism (for instance, by separating commercial and investment banking), and guarantee economic security for all.  And when the world war broke out in the late 1939, and especially after the fall of France in 1940, he was determined, as I showed in No End Save Victory, to build a military that could allow his idea of democracy not only to survive in the US, but to prevail throughout the Americas and if possible, in much of Europe and even Asia as well.  He succeeded in that goal, committing both the US and the world to his four freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear.  In the postwar period the essential philosophy of the New Deal became the basis for the new welfare states all over Western Europe and even in Japan. 

The Cold War remained a competition between the US and its allies on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the other, each offering a new and professedly superior way of life.  While American principles prevailed in western Europe, Soviet principles spread through China and into Korea and Vietnam.  Colonialism rapidly came to an end, and in one way or another most of the leaders of newly independent states were also committed to the goals of political rights and economic justice for their peoples.  And depending on their right, center or left orientation, they could count on some assistance from Washington or Moscow to achieve at least stability within their realms.

It is in this perspective that the collapse of Communism in 1989 takes on a whole new meaning.  While it appeared to represent the triumph of the west, now, almost thirty years later, it clearly marked the beginning of the end of the era which I have been describing.  The Cold War had forced both sides to claim that they were working for the interests of the peoples of their nation and of the world.  When it came to an end, governments lost the best of their mission.  All over the world, they have become increasingly beholden to economic interests.  It is not a coincidence, I suspect, that that trend has been most striking in Russia and the US, the two leading contestants in the Cold War.  Oligarchies rule them both now, and neither, to be blunt, offers the world a model which any nation ambitious for civic virtue or economic justice could want to emulate.  They are still setting an example, but a very different one.

And for this reason, I would suggest, the international customary law that grew up during the second half of the twentieth century and at least partially restrained the cruel excesses of states has broken down.  The President of the Philippines has unleashed a campaign of terror against his people, killing drug dealers and even users without trial.  Turkey has metamorphosed from the most westernized state in the Muslim world into an authoritarian dictatorship that relies largely on religion and has locked up tens of thousands of citizens, like the totalitarian regimes of the 1930s.  Venezuela is abandoning the last vestiges of its democracy.  And in the midst of all this, the Trump Administration is backing rapidly away from the United States' role as a monitor of international human rights.  Secretary Tillerson skipped his department's annual human rights observance, and has now approved arms sales to Bahrain that had previously been blocked on human rights grounds.  At the risk of shocking many readers, I must admit that I have always been skeptical about our government's role as a human rights enforcer.  While I applaud the efforts of private groups like Amnesty International to fight abuses, it seems to me that our government's attempts to do the same inevitably result in hypocrisy and often do more harm than good for the people we are trying to help.  The best way for us to promote human rights or economic justice is the way that we did so from about 1933 through 1965 or so: to promote those things at home.  But without a Cold War, we do not even worry that we have one of the largest prison populations in the world.

More than 10 years ago, when it was becoming clear to me where the US was repudiating the best traditions of mid-century politics, I gave a talk in Berlin, and suggested that it would perhaps be up to the Europeans to stand up for the principles they had shared with us in the postwar era.  Sadly, that has not really happened either.  Although Angela Merkel has remained an aggressive defender of human rights, she is also complicit in the austerity policies that have helped cripple many major and lesser European economies, and the politics of the various European nations are even more fragmented than our own.  Global warming looms as the one element of our future that might force the world into a rebirth of strong institutions in order to make sure that our civilization survives.  That is almost exactly what happened in the first half of the twentieth century.  For a long time I was please that I would not, apparently, have to live through a crisis comparable to the Second World War.  I still would not want to repeat it, but I see now that its terror, loss of life, and great crimes were linked, in a sense, to the great political achivements of that era that gave me and my contemporaries the world in which we grew up.