The Civic Poverty of Los Angeles

For all of the city’s economic heft, cultural imprimatur and cosmopolitanism, what stands out in equal measure is the paucity of hometown institutions capable of building the intellectual capital and civic consensus needed to advance LA’s place in an evolving world. 

Two events in recent months have shone a light on the yawning disconnect between the highly globalized megalopolis of Los Angeles and the penury of its civic institutions meant to inform elite and public opinion about its place in the world.

Eric Garcetti, the immediate past mayor of Los Angeles, is now ensconced in New Delhi as the new US ambassador to India.  When he was in City Hall, he often lauded LA’s centrality in solving global problems, claiming that if the city “did not exist, it would have to be invented.”   Garcetti, who previously chaired C40 Cities, a climate leadership organization composed of global megacities, reasoned that “If you change your city, you’re changing the world.” His predecessor also often spoke in a similar vein, regularly describing Los Angeles as “the Venice of the 21^st century,” a “great global city on a hill” and one that has the potential to become “the global capital linking the manufacturing economies of the east with the emerging markets of the south.”

On some counts, the nation’s second most populous city and its second-largest metropolitan economy, as well as the world’s third-largest metro economy, rises to this billing.  The region anchored by the city contains the country’s largest manufacturing hub and is one of the wealthiest cities in the world. If it were a country, LA would rank as the 17^th-largest economy in the world.  It places sixth in a fresh ranking of the world’s top financial centers, ahead of Shanghai.  According to another new survey, it ranks sixth among world cities in terms of the number of millionaires (205,400) who call it home and fourth when it comes to resident billionaires (42).  Indeed, the number of the city’s high-net-worth individuals rose 35 percent in the 2012-2022 period.  

The twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach comprise the largest port complex in the Western Hemisphere and are an essential node in America’s logistics system, handling more about 40 percent of all US container imports.  The Los Angeles region is the nation’s largest metropolitan export market, its premier customs district, and one of the largest recipients of foreign direct investment. Indeed, international trade is the primary driver of the area’s employment.

The city also serves as a commercial and social crossroads with the countries of Asia and Latin America. The Los Angeles international airport ranks as the world’s fourth busiest in terms of passenger traffic, the world’s third busiest in terms of aircraft landings and takeoffs, and the second busiest in the United States in terms of international passengers.  Hollywood, the epicenter of the global entertainment industry, is synonymous with Los Angeles.  It exercises a decisive imprint on global culture and is a major factor in America’s “soft power” appeal for the rest of the world (see here and here).  Indeed, the New York Times recently noted that LA’s cultural norms are even taking root in Manhattan.

Moreover, the city and its environs are one of the world’s most culturally diverse areas. According to one estimate, 224 languages, not including dialects, are spoken in LA, which also has 180 language-specific publications. Los Angeles attracts more foreign students than any other region in the US.  It is home to the largest Filipino, Iranian and Korean diasporas in the world, while the world’s biggest Cambodian diaspora is in Long Beach, just south of the city.  The Thai population in Los Angeles is the biggest in any city outside of Asia. The region is home to the largest Armenian population in the United States, as well as substantial Chinese and Vietnamese communities.  People of Mexican descent make up a third of LA residents and there are large diasporas from elsewhere in Latin America.

Yet for all of the city’s economic heft, cultural imprimatur and cosmopolitanism, what stands out in equal measure is the paucity of hometown institutions capable of building the intellectual capital and civic consensus needed to advance LA’s place in an evolving world.  Far from being able to offer constructive ideas to address global challenges, Los Angeles is increasingly incapable of adapting itself to meet changing international conditions.

Consider, for example, the two high-profile diplomatic conclaves Los Angeles hosted this past summer: The Summit of the Americas, which drew President Joe Biden along with a number of Latin American heads of government; and the inaugural ministerial meeting for the Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, which convened a dozen trade and commerce ministers from Asia.  Both episodes featured an array of government and private-sector leaders who usually bypass Southern California on their journeys to and from Washington and New York. Strikingly, however, barely any LA-based group bothered to organize programming with them or otherwise took notice of their rare presence.   These collective omissions represented a huge missed opportunity for organizations that are supposed to contribute to the civic discussion of the role Los Angeles plays in and can aspire to in the world.

It remains to be seen whether a similar neglect will occur when high-ranking Asian government leaders and corporate executives travel to California for the annual Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation leadership summit, which will gather in San Francisco this coming November.

An examination of this civic dystrophy must begin with the decline of the Los Angeles Times, the recipient of scores of Pulitzer Prizes and once the nation’s largest metro newspaper.  It played an instrumental role in the emergence of Los Angeles as a great city, and blossomed into one of the world’s leading newspapers starting in the 1960s by broadening its national and international focus.  The newspaper received prominent mention in David Halberstam’s 1979 book, The Powers That Be, about the influence of media dynasties on American politics and society. 

Yet over the past 20 years, it has been engulfed in chaos, plagued by a bankruptcy, internecine management dramas, a series of ownership changes, rapid turnover of top editors, and steadily dwindling advertising revenue and readership.  In sharp contrast to earlier decades, it now plays little role in helping local elites and the public at large understand how international trends fit together and what they portend for Southern California.  Its falling stature was epitomized in 2018, when the newspaper was forced by financial pressures to move out of its landmark Art Deco headquarters sitting a block away from Los Angeles city hall, to a non-descript office building located outside of the city’s limits.

The Times was once a prime backer of the Pacific Council on International Policy (PCIP), established in the mid-1990s as the West Coast partner of the prestigious New York-based Council on Foreign Relations.  Conceived as an invitation-only membership group, PCIP’s founding vision was to connect and mobilize foreign policy-minded elites on the US West Coast in the same manner CFR has done for decades on the East Coast.  For its first 15 years, the Pacific Council was reasonably successful in this quest, creating a robust membership and a full slate of activities that spanned from Seattle to San Diego and as far east as Denver.  Its annual conference was the premier West Coast gathering on foreign policy issues, and it operated an active think tank that was one of the few to illuminate and clarify foreign policy choices of particular salience to this part of the country.

Yet over the past dozen years, PCIP has become a shell of its former self.  It has starkly diminished its ambitions, programming and convening authority, downsizing in the process from an influential coastal institution to one operating almost solely in the Los Angeles area.  In a break from its traditional recruitment practices, it is now directly soliciting membership applications from the general public instead of relying on confidential nominations from already-vetted members.  Its pared-down annual conference no longer has its earlier cachet, and the group has been recently cutting its staff numbers.

Moreover, PCIP jettisoned its think tank more than a decade ago just as similar organizations, such as the Asia Society in New York and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, decided to create or expand their own analytical and thought-leadership functions.  The closure was even more inexplicable since it occurred just weeks after the release of a lauded report on US-India economic relations that was the product of a joint task force of respected West Coast and Indian business leaders.  The task force filled a void by offering the kind of policy insights that East Coast institutions usually overlook.  The report was also briefed to high-level officials at both the US State Department and the Office of the US Trade Representative, with one of the task force’s co-chairs being appointed a special advisor on Indian trade matters to the Obama administration as a result.

One person above all is responsible for PCIP’s diminished state: Its current president, Jerrold D. Green.  His appointment was a curiosity, as he does not command much respect with LA’s leadership circles, and his deep vanity and rebarbative personality are not suited for rallying civic consensus in such a diverse city.  Alarmed by his volatile temperament, the organization’s senior staff was staunchly opposed to his appointment. When approached by staff, PCIP board chairman, the former US Secretary of State Warren Christopher, curtly dismissed their concerns, replying that he was too old and ill to expend any more energy on the matter.

Once in place, Green’s behavior confirmed staff fears by quickly creating an office culture dominated by fear and anxiety.  His management style consisted of intimidation, angry tirades and verbal abuse. He launched harassment campaigns against staffers who fell out of favor and incentivized others to join in the attacks.  The emotional toll on staff became so bad that his own chief deputy (who had opposed his appointment) was forced to seek therapy for sleep disorders.  His mistreatment of a female person of color resulted in a reprimand from the University of Southern California (USC), with which PCIP is affiliated, though he did succeed in unjustly pushing out a white male staffer who alerted university authorities to his misconduct.  All in all, three staffers either sued him or threatened to take legal action within his first two years, while others dealt with the bullying by simply walking away.  The PCIP board of directors, led by Christopher, turned a blind eye to all of this.

USC is the oldest private research university in California and one of the largest private employers in the Los Angeles area.  It has grown markedly in academic standing over the past three decades, though its reputation has taken a major hit by a recent series of scandals (see here, here and here).  Incongruently, however, USC’s leadership has permitted the university’s internationally-focused components to atrophy at precisely the moment when their knowledge creation is most needed.

The USC School of International Relations, founded in 1924, is the world’s third-oldest school in its field and among the first in the United States to establish a doctoral program.  Yet its luster has steadily grown dim over the past quarter-century.  None of its degree-granting programs appear among the top 25 such programs in a recent ranking by Foreign Policy magazine.  In 2019, the School even lost its nearly century-long organizational identity when it was merged into the lackluster political science department. 

A similar fate has befallen the university’s US-China Institute, launched in 2006 with grand ambitions and much fanfare.  In the intervening years, USC leaders have left it to wither on the vine.  To date, no faculty director has been appointed to oversee the institute, which now operates on a shoestring budget and conducts minimal programming.  However, the university’s track record is at least much better on China than on the other rising power in Asia.  A good part of the USC foreign student population comes from India, but the country has been virtually ignored by the university’s social science units.  A proposal to create a chair position in Indian studies has been gathering dust in the social sciences dean’s office for nearly two decades.  Incredibly, USC has been unable to leverage Indian business tycoon Ratan N. Tata’s position on its board of trustees for a large-scale philanthropic gift despite his giving sizable donations to Harvard and Cornell universities.

The Asia Society, headquartered in New York, is a renowned organization established in the mid-1950s to foster greater knowledge of Asia in the United States.  It operates a global network of regional centers, including one in Los Angeles.  Given the city’s dense linkages to Asia, the LA branch should be flourishing.  But it has never lived up to its potential and is now the smallest and weakest link in the Asia Society’s network of 15 centers around the world.  Despite Asia’s dynamic and rapid evolutions, the LA center offers a very narrow and languid set of activities, now mainly focused on celebrations of Asian cinema or explorations of anti-Asian racism in the United States.  Its counterpart in San Francisco, by contrast, has a much more active and substantive agenda as well as a larger membership base.

The LA branch’s oversight board is dominated by individuals having major business relationships in China (a development that has given rise to controversy).  As a consequence, no other Asia Society branch, apart from its Hong Kong center, is more beholden to Chinese interests.  For example, a proposal to showcase the work of Chloe Zhao, a Chinese-born filmmaker who won two Academy Awards for her 2020 movie, Nomadland, was preemptively nixed due to fears of offending Beijing since Zhao had made comments some interpreted as critical of China.  The decision to honor Ellen Gu, the American-born freestyle skier who chose to compete for China at the 2022 Winter Olympics, also raised more than a few skeptical eyebrows.  As The Economist magazine noted, when Gu chose China over America she became “a giant projection of Chinese soft power at a time when the government has been widely criticized for wielding far more of the harder type.” 

Decisions like these have led some ASSC insiders to conclude that the organization has been coopted by Chinese economic interests.  They speak of the group as a “United Front” entity, a reference to the Chinese communist party’s United Front Work Department, which conducts influence operations in foreign countries.

A number of factors have contributed to the LA center’s enervation but a primary one has to do with a board long content with the branch’s somnolence.  Until recently, the board was chaired by Richard Drobnick, who brought little energy and vision to the post, and turned a blind eye to the board’s deference to Chinese interests.  Either as chairman or as a long-serving board member, he appointed a succession of ineffective executive directors, some of whom knew little about Asia.  The organization’s dysfunction came into full view in April 2019 when resource constraints forced it to outsource to the Pacific Council the rollout of a high-profile report on US-China relations that had been released by the Asia Society’s think tank in New York.  Drobnick’s leadership deficiencies finally became so noticeable that he was recently ousted from the chairman’s role, reportedly on orders from the New York headquarters.

Until the early 1990s, two broad-based membership organizations – the Los Angeles World Affairs Council and Town Hall Los Angeles – actively served to promote the general public’s understanding of critical foreign policy matters.  Both institutions experienced significant decline in the intervening years as their financial backing and membership numbers shriveled.  A decade ago, the World Affairs Council’s travails became so acute that it offered to subsume itself into the Pacific Council, only to have its own membership rebel against the plan.  As its condition grew more desperate, it eventually jumped at an offer to merge with Town Hall, an organization that itself had all but faded into invisibility.

Rounding out the roster of LA institutions is the RAND Corporation, a world-famous global think tank created in 1948 and headquartered in Santa Monica, just outside of Los Angeles.  It has played a prominent role in informing US policymakers on a range of national security and international policy issues.  Unlike the other organizations profiled here, it is thriving these days.  But since RAND receives much of its financing via US government contracts, it does not have much resonance with LA leadership circles.  Moreover, much of its current work on international policy matters takes place in its office located in the Washington area.

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President Trump, Geopolitical Mastermind

A classic 1986 Saturday Night Live skit, titled “President Reagan, Mastermind,” portrayed him as a cunning and focused operator within the confines of the Oval Office.  The bit was meant as a comedic rebuke to Reagan’s professions of ignorance about the unfolding Iran-Contra scandal, and it quickly became seen as a brilliant piece of political humor since it offered a reinterpretation jarringly at odds with the genial but clueless figure the Gipper’s critics often sketched out.

A similar redefinition of President Trump appeared last week on the op-ed pages of the Financial Times.  Mark Leonard, head of the European Council on Foreign Relations, reports that Chinese elites hold a very different perspective on Trump’s foreign policy than what is offered by the conventional wisdom in the West, which regards the president as a geopolitical naif and a reckless, impulsive leader.  In stark contrast, Leonard writes that the officials and experts he recently visited in Beijing are “awed by [Trump’s] skill as a strategist and tactician.”

According to Leonard, his Chinese interlocutors describe Trump:

as a master tactician, focusing on one issue at a time, and extracting as many concessions as he can.  They speak of the skilful way Mr Trump has treated President Xi Jinping. ‘Look at how he handled North Korea,’ one says. ‘He got Xi Jinping to agree to UN sanctions [half a dozen] times, creating an economic stranglehold on the country. China almost turned North Korea into a sworn enemy of the country.’ But they also see him as a strategist, willing to declare a truce in each area when there are no more concessions to be had, and then start again with a new front.

And while many of Trump’s detractors in the West regard his policy toward Moscow as craven and sycophantic, Leonard’s sources perceive a wily geopolitical strategy: “They see it as Henry Kissinger in reverse. In 1972, the US nudged China off the Soviet axis in order to put pressure on its real rival, the Soviet Union. Today Mr Trump is reaching out to Russia in order to isolate China.”

The Chinese assessment of Trump, at least as presented by Leonard, offers a strong counterpoint to the prevailing narrative about the cogency of the president’s foreign policy as well as to the partisan accusations alleging that the president, as one Democratic senator charges, has somehow become “a Russian asset.”

Indeed, the Daily Beast reports that Henry Kissinger himself, who has met at least three times with Trump since the 2016 presidential campaign, has advanced the idea that Washington should attempt a rapprochement with Moscow in order to counter Beijing’s growing global power, and that the pitch has found receptive ears inside the administration.  And one former administration official describes Trump’s approach toward Russia as “the reverse of the Nixon-China play.”

Last week’s meeting in Washington between President Trump and Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, offers additional evidence for the narrative Leonard advances.  For months Beijing has been wooing EU leaders with offers of an anti-U.S. alliance (see here and here), and Juncker showed up at the White House fresh from his own summit in Beijing where Chinese officials renewed their pitch.  Yet for all of the hand-wringing about Trump pushing key U.S. allies into Beijing’s embrace, Trump and Juncker emerged from their meeting to announce a high-level push for a new U.S/EU trade accord.

Indeed, according to Trump’s chief economic adviser, Juncker also signaled that the EU “will be allied” with the United States in countering China on global trade issues.  Commenting on the EU deal, one Washington observer notes, “The president created so many battles on trade that now he has gotten everyone to say we are all on your side on China.”  And one journalist observes that Beijing ended up the loser because “Trump has cut himself far more leeway to indulge in China-bashing.”

If Trump is indeed attempting to pull off a Kissingerian power play with Russia and China, the prospects for major success are in doubt.  The Nixon administration was able to capitalize on years of bitter ideological disputes between Moscow and Beijing, not to mention the outbreak of actual military conflict in 1969 that threatened to escalate to the nuclear level.  Fissures do exist in the current Russian-Chinese relationship, and it must grate Vladimir Putin’s nationalist sensibilities that Moscow is widely seen as Beijing’s junior partner in global affairs.  Nonetheless, there does not appear to be much in the way of strategic opportunity for the Trump administration to exploit.

Still, Trump’s machinations may be having some geopolitical effect.  Leonard reveals that because of Trump’s multiple pressure points on Beijing, “many Chinese experts are quietly calling for a rethink of the longer-term strategy. They want to prepare the ground for a new grand bargain with the US based on Chinese retrenchment. Many feel that Mr Xi has over-reached and worry that it was a mistake simultaneously to antagonise the US economically and militarily in the South China Sea.”

The scope and depth of this sentiment are unclear, though one China expert reports hearing similar things in Beijing.  Nonetheless, it is a striking development at a time when the general narrative within the U.S. foreign policy commentariat is about China’s global ascendancy amid Trump’s fecklessness.  And it does underscore the possibility that the current U.S. president may be a more multifaceted leader than his most vocal critics allow.

UPDATE (August 5, 2018): Jerome A. Cohen, a leading U.S. expert on China, likewise reports serious foreign policy debates underway in Beijing:

Many Chinese critics, for example, believe that Xi has moved too unwisely in rapidly unfolding the enormously expensive Belt and Road Initiative, in militarizing the South China Sea and ostentatiously spurning the Philippine arbitration against China in violation of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, and in uncertainly responding to Trump’s bewildering trade-war challenge.

The Beijing bureau chief for the Financial Times newspaper sees the same thing, reporting that in private “more Chinese officials and intellectuals are expressing doubts about [Xi Jinping’s] handling of relations with the US.”  He quotes one Chinese business executive as saying that among the Chinese bureaucracy’s rank and file, “more people are now questioning whether it was right for Xi to go against the US so openly”.  He adds that a “senior US business executive who meets frequently with senior Chinese officials said that since the trade war began in earnest in May, they have displayed ‘a mix of confidence, frustration, anger and insecurity — and at any moment one of those is more dominant than the rest'”.

UPDATE (August 7, 2018): Bloomberg Businessweek today quotes a Chinese observer as saying that the US-China “trade war has made China more humble,” and reports that:

grumbling has begun to echo around the halls of government. One Finance Ministry official says China made a “major misjudgment” of Trump’s determination to confront the country. Others wonder if China underestimated the durability of American power. “The U.S. will use its hegemonic system, established since World War II from trade, finance, currency, military, and so on, to stop the rise of China,” Ren Zeping, chief economist at China Evergrande Group, wrote in one widely read commentary published on June 5.

UPDATE (August 9, 2018): Reuters similarly reports:

“Many economists and intellectuals are upset about China’s trade war policies,” an academic at a Chinese policy think tank told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue. “The overarching view is that China’s current stance has been too hard-line and the leadership has clearly misjudged the situation.”

An early version of this essay appears at Asia Sentinel.

I invite you to connect with me via Facebook and Twitter.

Did Obama Set Trump Up for Failure in Asia?

Donald Trump is encountering a fusillade of criticism alleging that his approach to Asia is creating a vacuum that will be eagerly filled by Beijing.  But those making this argument would be much more honest if they acknowledged that part of the blame lies with Trump’s predecessor as well.

That Barack Obama deserves censure was made plain in a recent Washington Post interview with Max Baucus, the immediate past U.S. ambassador in China, who offered a remarkably critical appraisal of Mr. Obama’s leadership skills and policy toward Beijing.  Indeed, his remarks underscore long-time criticisms regarding Obama’s leadership shortcomings, as well as the real problem his administration faced in matching fine words and good intentions with concrete foreign policy actions.

One of the complaints Baucus registered concerns the fate of the “Trans-Pacific Partnership” (TPP), the Obama administration’s project to build a U.S.-centric trade bloc in East Asia that would have brought together 12 countries and nearly 40 percent of the global economy.  The TPP was a key component to Obama’s signature foreign policy initiative – variously known as the “pivot” or the strategic “rebalance” – aimed at shoring up the U.S. presence in a region that is increasingly under Chinese sway.

As Singapore’s prime minister Lee Hsien Loong declared last year to U.S. business executives, ratification of the ambitious trade and investment agreement was widely seen in Asia as “a litmus test of your credibility and seriousness of purpose.”  TPP was denounced by both major candidates during the recent U.S. presidential campaign and officially torpedoed by the new Trump administration.  But even as the agreement was being negotiated, there were widespread suspicions about whether the Obama White House had the political gumption to see through the Congressional approval process.

Baucus makes clear that Obama himself deserves part of the blame for the TPP debacle.  The newspaper quotes him as saying:

The [Obama] administration didn’t have the same zeal, the single-minded, mongoose-tenacity to get the thing passed that [U.S. Trade Representative] Mike Froman and several others in the bus had.  The president didn’t get involved nearly as much as I thought he could and should. 

Criticism of Mr. Obama’s leadership skills are nothing new.  Leon E. Panetta, the Democratic Party’s elder statesman who served as his second Pentagon chief, highlighted this inadequacy in a recent memoir, particularly what he calls the president’s “most conspicuous weakness” – “a frustrating reticence to engage his opponents and rally support for his cause.”  Obama, he added, sometimes lacks fire, preferring instead to rely “on the logic of a law professor rather than the passion of a leader.”  As a result, Obama “avoids the battle, complains, and misses opportunities.”

Just before the memoir’s release, a senior Obama administration official conceded Panetta’s point, acknowledging that the president’s leadership style was “much more that of the lawyer than the CEO.”  Too often, and on too many important policy issues, Obama conceived of the presidency as an exercise in thought leadership rather than the engine for the messy politicking a pluralist democracy requires.  As a Bloomberg View columnist summed up on Obama’s last day in office,

… to make policy work, you need politics. And politics is not about white papers. It is about making unsatisfactory deals and calling in favors from your friends, friends you usually made by helping them out with an unsatisfactory deal of their own. An intellectual approach to policy-making that tried to bypass those unseemly details, it turned out, didn’t necessarily result in good policy.

Obama’s frequent detachment from the policy process led to a huge disjuncture between his promise on shifting strategic focus to Asia – a region where the president once said “the action’s going to be” and “Here, we see the future” – and his actual accomplishments on this score.   Unveiled to much fanfare (here and here) in late 2011, the Obama administration placed great rhetorical emphasis on the Asian pivot.  In early 2013, Tom Donilon, the U.S. national Security advisor, proclaimed that “when it comes to the Asia-Pacific, the United States is ‘all in’.”  Later that year, his successor, Susan Rice, insisted the pivot was “a cornerstone of the Obama administration’s foreign policy.”  A few months before the administration’s term ended, she emphasized the president’s “profound commitment to the Asia Rebalance.”

But for all of these professions, Baucus states that the administration was never able to devise a coherent, sustainable policy for dealing with a rising China: “We’re much too ad hoc.  We don’t seem to have a long-term strategy, and that’s very much to our disadvantage.”

Indeed, many long questioned Obama’s determination to see through not only TPP’s implementation but also the buildup of military forces necessary to contest a more assertive China.  Just months before launching the pivot, he undermined his own credibility by signing into law the 2011 Budget Control Act and then did nothing in subsequent years to relieve the sharp pressures it imposed on the U.S. defense budget.  In March 2014, for example, the Pentagon’s acquisitions chief acknowledged that “Right now, the pivot is being looked at again, because candidly it can’t happen [due to budget pressures].”  At the same time, a Japanese official told the New York Times, “If there’s real rebalancing, it is hard to find.”  Even more trenchant, the newspaper also quotes a long-time Asia hand who worked in the first Obama administration as saying that pivot was “ill-conceived and bungled in its implementation.”

As a consequence of Mr. Obama’s failure to back up his rhetoric with the necessary fiscal resources, the U.S. military currently confronts a severe readiness deficit at a time when Chinese military strength is noticeably increasing.  The U.S. Navy was slated to play a central role in the pivot, yet two-thirds of its mainstay F/A-18 strike fighters are currently grounded due to lack of spare parts or maintenance backlogs.   Overall, more than half of the service’s aircraft inventory – including fighters, transport, patrol and reconnaissance planes as well as helicopters – are presently out of service.  The U.S. Army reports that only three of its 58 combat brigade teams are capable of immediate deployment, while the U.S. Air Force states that it is “now able to keep only half of our force at an acceptable level of readiness.”  Astoundingly, U.S. military leaders recently testified that President Obama never personally discussed this readiness crisis with them.

These problems have not gone unnoticed in Beijing.  A new Chinese navy internal assessment concludes that China has now secured military supremacy in the South China Sea and that the United States “lacks both the ability and will to engage in a military conflict or go to war with us.”

Nor has the situation escaped notice among long-time U.S. allies.  Philippines’ president Rodrigo Duterte, for example, stated last September that “China is now in power and they have military superiority in the region.”

And a recent Australian analysis concludes that “China now has the strategic initiative in South East Asia.”  It adds:

China now dominates militarily the central ASEAN region.  In times of peace and crisis, this military capability could be used to intimidate, bully or cajole regional states.  In times of limited regional war, China is now the odds-on favorite.

Donald Trump may well be hastening the day when American leadership in East Asia is eclipsed by China.  But if that were to happen, one should not lose sight of the previous president’s role.

UPDATE (March 29): A Financial Times article today reports:

Even some US officials privately acknowledge that China has won the battle for the South China Sea without firing a shot. In the annals of American decline, this episode will surely loom large….

….Much of the fault lies with Barack Obama, the former US president, and Hillary Clinton, his secretary of state.

An earlier version of this essay appears at Asia Sentinel.

I invite you to connect with me via Facebook and Twitter.

 

Mattis Shines a Poor Light on the Obama White House

My previous post focused on the unnoticed irony involved in the appointment of James N. Mattis as President Trump’s Defense Secretary, given the Obama administration’s treatment of him when he was head of the U.S. Central Command.  But the Mattis story also underscores two other themes articulated in a number of earlier posts.  The first point regards the utter disingenuousness of President Obama’s once-regular threats to use military force to stop Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.  The second is about the dysfunctional character of the Obama national security process.

A recent Washington Post report about the relationship between General Mattis and the Obama White House emphasizes the overriding priority Mr. Obama put on reaching an accommodation with Iran over its atomic ambitions.  In the summer of 2011, Mattis proposed to undertake a military strike against Iran in retaliation for the causalities Tehran-backed militias were inflicting on U.S. forces in Iraq.  The plan reportedly prompted “heated discussions” in Washington that “stretched out for weeks” before it was ultimately rejected by President Obama.  As the newspaper notes, Mattis concluded from the episode that “Obama White House was unwilling to take the fight directly to the Iranians, even when they drew American blood.”

More ructions between Mattis and the White House soon followed.  A second “heated debate” took place during late 2011 and early 2012 when Mattis asked for contingent permission to take preemptive action against any Iranian attempt to mine the strategically-critical Strait of Hormuz.  As the Obama team began to engage in multilateral talks with Iran in the summer of 2012, Mattis further raised hackles by “relentlessly [drilling] the U.S. military’s war plan for Iran” and by emphasizing in his reports to Washington the destabilizing role Tehran was playing in the Middle East, including its support for terrorism.

By early 2013, tensions had grown such that Mattis was unceremoniously removed from his post.  Although the Obama administration did not present his ouster as a rebuke, Mattis is reportedly convinced that “he had been dismissed early for running afoul of the White House.” Dennis Ross, who was then Obama’s point person on Iran policy, is also quoted in the newspaper as saying:

It was a kind of culture clash.  There was such a preoccupation in the White House with not doing things that would provoke Iran or be seen as provocative. Mattis was, by definition, inclined toward doing those things that would be seen as provocative. And as time went by, this became increasingly less acceptable to them [emphasis added].

It is, of course, a president’s prerogative to choose his own military commanders and dictate the perimeters of their conduct.  But note the striking disjunction between what was going on behind the scenes with Mattis and what Mr. Obama was publicly saying in 2012.  In that year’s State of the Union address, the president stated that “America is determined to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and I will take no options off the table to achieve that goal.”  In a media interview shortly afterwards, he emphasized that he was not bluffing about the military option and that “when the United States says it is unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, we mean what we say.”  “I don’t bluff,” he emphatically insisted. Obama then followed this up with a hard-hitting address to the American Israel Political Action Committee, an influential lobbying group in Washington, stressing that “when it comes to preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, I will take no options off the table, and I mean what I say.”

This blog has long been suspicious (see here and here) of the sincerity of the threats President Obama was making at this time about his willingness to undertake military action, if necessary, to curb Iran’s nuclear program.  The Washington Post report further reinforces these doubts.

The Mattis story also exemplifies a regular criticism made about the Obama policy-making process – that his national security inner team was not above squelching dissenting views or insulating him from unpalatable news.  Commenting on Mattis’s ouster from CENTCOM, Thomas E. Ricks, a defense journalist generally sympathetic to the administration, exclaimed at the time that “The message the Obama Administration is sending, intentionally or not, is that it doesn’t like tough, smart, skeptical generals who speak candidly to their civilian superiors.”

A number of previous posts (here, here, here and here) have detailed the Obama White House’s intolerance of critical advice, even when it came from inside the administration.  And the Washington Post article bolsters this point, quoting Leon E. Panetta, who was Defense Secretary at the time, as saying about the debate triggered by Mattis’s plans for retaliating against Iran:

There were clearly White House staff who thought the recommendations he was making were too aggressive.  But I thought a lot of that was, frankly, not having the maturity to look at all of the options that a president should look at in order to make the right decisions [emphasis added].

Senate Democrats heaped high praise on Mattis during his confirmation hearing because they saw his experience as something that will add stability and balance to the new Trump team.  But they showed no awareness that his story also illuminates the real deficiencies of President Obama’s national security policies.

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The Irony of the Mattis Appointment

The easy confirmation of James N. Mattis as President Trump’s Defense Secretary entails no small amount of irony.  Senate Democrats perceive the retired Marine general as someone who will speak unvarnished truth to a new White House team they fear will try to insulate Mr. Trump from unpalatable news and disagreeable perspectives.  But left unremarked upon is that his earlier tenure as the head of the U.S. Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East, was cut short by the Obama administration for doing precisely that.

Read the full essay at Fair Observer.

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Obama’s Disinterest in Europe: An Update

Two earlier posts (here and here) argued that President Barack Obama has largely been disinterested in America’s European allies.  Although this view attracted criticism from those insisting I exaggerated the case, evidence has continued to roll in buttressing my position.

The newest piece of proof comes courtesy of DC Leaks, a website that has posted materials purloined from, among others, the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.  Included in its collection are emails hacked from the personal Gmail account of General Philip Breedlove, who until recently served as NATO’s supreme military commander.

Two of Breedlove’s notes are particularly striking.  In the first, he writes to Colin Powell in September 2014, six months after Russia’s seizure of the Crimea peninsula, seeking the former U.S. Secretary of State’s assistance in re-energizing the Obama administration’s focus on European affairs.  Breedlove confides that “I do not see this [White House] as really ‘engaged’ on Europe/NATO.”

A second note in March 2015 concerns the extraordinary snub Mr. Obama had just delivered to Jens Stoltenberg, who months earlier had been appointed as NATO’s secretary general.  Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and Susan Rice, Obama’s national security advisor, all passed up a chance to confer with Stoltenberg during his visit to Washington even as Russian depredations against Ukraine continued.  According to a media report, Stoltenberg requested a meeting with Obama well in advance of the visit but never heard back from the White House.

Commenting on the incident, Breedlove laments to a friend that “This is a mess.  I do not understand our [White House].”

At a NATO summit two months ago, Obama declared that “in good times and in bad, Europe can count on the United States – always.”  But many of his actions have registered the opposite message, so much so that the chairman of the German parliament’s foreign affairs committee even blames the president for begetting Donald Trump’s skepticism of the NATO alliance.  (For a similar view by a U.S. foreign policy pundit, see here.)

Eight years ago, Mr. Obama won over European hearts by promising not to conduct himself like George W. Bush and the continent gratefully responded by awarding him a Nobel peace prize in the mere anticipation he would live up to his promise.  He has indeed been true to his word, though very much not in a way European leaders had hoped.  Reflecting on Obama’s legacy for U.S.-European relations, Ana Palacio, a former foreign minister of Spain, recently concluded that “the lasting impression that Barack Obama will leave us [Europeans] with is one of disenchantment.”

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Obama’s Intelligence Scandal: An Update

According to news reports, a large group of intelligence analysts working at the U.S. Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East, have formally complained that their superiors altered assessments about the Islamic State and Al Qaeda in order to adhere more closely with the Obama administration’s public line that the military campaign against these groups is progressing well.  As I argued in a previous post, the emerging scandal exemplifies a long-running critique about Mr. Obama’s approach to foreign policy – that his national security inner team is excessively focused on the dictates of domestic politics and is not above squelching dissenting views.

The Daily Beast, which has taken the lead in breaking this story, now reports that the intelligence scandal has broader dimensions: Two senior analysts at CENTCOM, including the top expert on Syria, have been ousted from their positions due to their assessments casting doubt on the viability of the Obama administration’s plans to arm rebel groups fighting the Bashar al-Assad regime.

In a separate report, the publication also claims that the CENTCOM work environment has turned “toxic” and “hostile” as top officials there have created a culture of intimidation.

Lastly, it’s worth noting that the House intelligence committee, which is conducting its own investigation into the scandal, has complained that CENTCOM is deleting relevant documents and harassing analysts it wishes to interview.

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How Sincere were Obama’s Threats to Stop Iranian Nuclear Proliferation?

Jeffrey Goldberg’s detailed exposition in The Atlantic of Barack Obama’s foreign policy outlook has sparked a wave of media commentary as well as damage-limitation efforts by the White House.  Based on a series of far-reaching interviews with the U.S. president, the piece contains a number of fascinating revelations, including Obama’s high regard for his own decision-making ability and corresponding disdain for the leadership skills possessed by many of his counterparts on the world stage; his suspicion of Washington’s foreign policy cognoscenti who he believes adulate the idea of deterrence credibility and in any case reflect the interests of their Jewish and Arab benefactors; and his disregard for America’s traditional allies in Europe and the Middle East.  On this last point, Goldberg quotes Obama as saying “free riders aggravate me” – a sentiment that Donald Trump holds as well.

So far, however, the exegesis of Obama’s views has missed a fundamental issue: How can a president who makes plain his deep aversion to new strategic entanglements in the Middle East and believes (in Goldberg’s words) that the region “is no longer terribly important to American interests” also insist his earlier threats to use military force to stop Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons were entirely serious?

There is a gaping logical disconnect – nay, an outright contradiction – between these two tenets given that any military action against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure was bound to trigger even greater levels of regional violence and instability that Mr. Obama so obviously wants to keep at arm’s length.

Read the full essay at The Diplomat.

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Obama and Europe’s Lament

My post a year ago about the breakdown in President Obama’s relations with European leaders elicited pushback from those insisting I exaggerated the discord.  But on-going developments have only bolstered my case.

Consider the report a few months ago by John Vinocur, formerly executive editor of the Paris-based International Herald Tribune (now re-named the International New York Times).  He noted a growing disenchantment among European political and policy elites with the caliber of Mr. Obama’s leadership on policy toward Russia as well as an increased willingness to give public expression to this view.  “The U.S. president is getting openly dissed,” is how he put it.  Moreover, the absence of American leadership was causing European officials to see no alternative but to make accommodations with Moscow.

A similar assessment is offered by Roger Cohen, formerly the New York Times’ foreign editor and Berlin bureau chief, who now writes an op-ed column.  In a piece earlier this month, he excoriated President Obama’s approach toward Syria for, among other things, contributing to “a potential unraveling of the core of the European Union as internal borders eliminated on a free continent are re-established as a response to an unrelenting refugee tide…”

Cohen quotes a senior European diplomat as saying: “The Syrian crisis is now a European crisis.  But the president is not interested in Europe.” Cohen adds: “That is a fair assessment of the first postwar American leader for whom the core trans-Atlantic alliance was something to be dutifully upheld rather than emotionally embraced.”

Likewise, Josh Rogin at Bloomberg View reports that the consensus among European officials and experts attending this year’s Munich Security Conference is that the Obama administration is simply unwilling to do anything substantial to address the multiple crises gripping the region.  He quotes a French policy leader as stating: “There is a growing sense that this U.S. administration is focused on establishing a legacy on what has already been achieved rather than trying to achieve anything more.”

Rogin adds…

During the first day of the conference, the U.S. role in Europe was hardly mentioned in the public sessions. In the private sessions, many participants told me that European governments are not only resigned to a lack of American assertiveness, they also are now reluctantly accepting a Russia that is more present than ever in European affairs, and not for the better.

Nine years ago, when Mr. Obama first embarked on his presidential campaign he differentiated himself from George W. Bush by stressing a determination to rebuild U.S. alliances with other countries.  And on the night when he was elected to the Oval Office he pledged that “a new dawn of American leadership” was at hand.  European leaders these days must wonder whatever happened to that guy.

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Obama’s Disingenuousness on Iran: A Postscript

This blog has regularly thrown doubt on the sincerity of President Obama’s past vows about being prepared to resort to military force in order to prevent Iran’s nuclear ambitions.  So it’s worth noting a New York Times article the other week surveying the various factors that could have pushed Tehran toward the just-implemented nuclear agreement with the United States.

The newspaper credits the inducements held out by Secretary of State John Kerry’s diplomatic engagement, as well as the coercive effects of economic sanctions and covert programs aimed at sabotaging Iran’s nuclear weapons effort.  Another factor, according to the Times, was the threat of preventative military action – though by Israel but not the United States.

The Israeli factor was tangible enough.  Ehud Barak, who served as defense minister in Prime Minister’s Benjamin Netanyahu’s government from 2009-2013, revealed last year that Israel came close on several occasions to launching unilateral military strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

According to an October 2014 report in The Atlantic, U.S. officials were convinced in 2010 and again in 2012, that “Netanyahu and his then-defense minister, the cowboyish ex-commando Ehud Barak, were readying a strike on Iran….the fear inside the White House of a preemptive attack (or preventative attack, to put it more accurately) was real and palpable.”

Referring to these occasions, the New York Times piece quotes Michael Morell, who recently retired as deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, as saying “Before the negotiations for the nuclear deal began [in 2013] we were closer to war with the Islamic Republic than at any time since 1979.”  The newspaper also notes:

Mr. Obama had little doubt that if Israel started a conflict, the United States would be unable to stay out. That was the conclusion of a series of classified war-gaming exercises conducted at the National War College, at the Pentagon and inside American intelligence agencies.

It is difficult to discern what effect the fear of Israeli action had on Tehran’s calculus.  But its impact on Washington is already known.  In the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations two years ago, President Obama announced that the U.S. would no longer intercept the communications of allied leaders.  But a secret exception was made for Mr. Netanyahu, since the White House was convinced he would attack Iran without first bothering to consult with Washington.

Satellite surveillance of Israeli military bases was also stepped up after the U.S. concluded that Israeli aircraft had probed Iranian air defenses in preparation for a commando raid on Iran’s most heavily guarded nuclear facility.  And the U.S. Central Command, which oversees U.S. military forces in the Middle East, began monitoring weather patterns and the phases of the moon over Iran, trying to predict the exact night of the coming Israeli attack.

All of this evidence further reinforces my earlier conclusion that Obama’s threat to pick up the cudgel of military action was a rhetorical device aimed more at restraining the Israeli government than pressuring the Iranian one.

This post is jointly published at International Policy Digest.

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