Joe Biden thinks it is “bizarre” to call for conditioning military aid to Israel:

“In terms of Bernie and others who talk about dealing with Zionism, I strongly support Israel as an independent Jewish state,” Biden said in rural northeastern Iowa. He added, “The idea that I’d withdraw military aid, as others have suggested, from Israel, is bizarre. I would not do that. It’s like saying to France, ‘Because you don’t agree with us, we’re going to kick you out of NATO.”

Biden’s defense of unconditional support for Israel isn’t new, but it does show how outdated his foreign policy views are and how out of touch he is with a large part of his own party. There is much less support now than there used to be among Democrats for giving Israel a blank check while it occupies Palestinian territories and routinely abuses Palestinian people. It makes no sense for the U.S. to refuse to use the leverage that it has to influence the Israeli government. Biden is wrong on the substance, which shows once again that his foreign policy judgment is not very good. Biden’s position is a throwback to previous decades. It simply isn’t credible when Israel doesn’t need U.S. aid and it engages in flagrant, ongoing violations of international law. Sanders and other candidates that have called for conditioning aid on changes in Israeli behavior are proposing a relatively moderate response to Israel’s aggressive policy of settlement, dispossession, and apartheid, and Biden still has the nerve to say that it is “bizarre.”

The former vice president’s comparison of conditioning military aid to Israel with attacking a formal alliance is revealing, but it doesn’t make the point that Biden thinks it does. Conditioning military aid to a client state is very different from trying to eject a state from an alliance. The reality is that Israel not a U.S. ally, and the behavior in question is not just a policy disagreement but a matter of respect for human rights and international law. U.S. aid to clients is supposed to advance U.S. interests. Giving Israel a blank check to do what it likes with weapons subsidized by our government achieves just the opposite. Unless Biden wants to argue that the U.S. should be encouraging indefinite Israeli occupation and the continued abuse of millions of stateless Palestinians, he shouldn’t have any objections to conditioning aid to Israel. Biden may think he is scoring points against Sanders and his other competitors, but he is just advertising the bankruptcy of the conventional “pro-Israel” hawkish position.

The president’s response to the Pensacola Naval Air Station shooting reflects his ugly habit of shielding Saudi Arabia from all criticism:

When a Saudi Air Force officer opened fire on his classmates at a naval base in Pensacola, Fla., on Friday, he killed three, wounded eight and exposed anew the strange dynamic between President Trump and the Saudi leadership: The president’s first instinct was to tamp down any suggestion that the Saudi government needed to be held to account.

Hours later, Mr. Trump announced on Twitter that he had received a condolence call from King Salman of Saudi Arabia, who clearly sought to ensure that the episode did not further fracture their relationship. On Saturday, leaving the White House for a trip here for a Republican fund-raiser and a speech on Israeli-American relations, Mr. Trump told reporters that “they are devastated in Saudi Arabia,” noting that “the king will be involved in taking care of families and loved ones.” He never used the word “terrorism.”

What was missing was any assurance that the Saudis would aid in the investigation, help identify the suspect’s motives, or answer the many questions about the vetting process for a coveted slot at one of the country’s premier schools for training allied officers. Or, more broadly, why the United States continues to train members of the Saudi military even as that same military faces credible accusations of repeated human rights abuses in Yemen, including the dropping of munitions that maximize civilian casualties.

The Pensacola shooting was a treacherous attack carried out by a member of the Saudi military against U.S. officers on American soil. The only reason that this man was in the U.S. at all was so that he could receive pilot training that he would probably have gone on to use in the service of the kingdom’s despicable bombing campaign in Yemen. The attack calls into question the Saudi military’s vetting of its own officers and the U.S. military’s scrutiny of the officers that it accepts into its training programs. This Saudi officer should never have been in the U.S., and it is a serious failure by both governments that he was allowed to participate in this program. It is one more example of why providing training to Saudi officers in the U.S. is a mistake. There should be serious consequences for future U.S.-Saudi cooperation, and there must be a thorough investigation to determine what went wrong on our government’s end that this person was accepted into the training program and granted entry into the U.S.

At the very least, we would expect the president and the Secretary of State to express their condemnation and outrage at the murders of American servicemen before they echoed the official talking points from Riyadh, but with this administration the main concern is to cover for the Saudis first. The article quotes Bruce Riedel:

But even stranger, said Mr. Riedel, was “the president’s parroting of the Saudi line” before learning the results of an investigation into whether the gunman acted alone, or had allegiances to Al Qaeda or terrorist groups.

This is the latest in a series of episodes in which the president parrots the Saudi line, because he has been determined to appear subservient before the Saudi government whenever there has been an opportunity to do so. One might think that an attack on a U.S. military base by a Saudi officer would be an occasion when he would make an exception, but it is not. It is all very well that the Saudi government expresses condolences for the attack, but the president shouldn’t be acting as their mouthpiece. The president should be demanding answers from them instead of running interference for them with the press. The article goes on to quote Aaron David Miller:

“If Trump wants to convey condolences from Saudi King Salman, fine,” Mr. Miller wrote on Twitter after the shooting. “But you don’t do it on day — Americans are killed — untethered from a message of ironclad assurances from King to provide” whatever cooperation is necessary to understand the gunman and his motives. “Otherwise Trump sounds like what he has become — a Saudi apologist.’’

There are hardly any foreign governments that the president refuses to criticize publicly, but he won’t say a word against the Saudi government no matter what happens. It was despicable when he recited Saudi propaganda to keep support for the war on Yemen going, and it was outrageous when he tried to help the Saudi government cover up their role in murdering Jamal Khashoggi, and it is disgusting that he still goes out of his way to protect them after this attack. The current noxious U.S.-Saudi relationship should have been ended years ago, and this attack and the president’s shameful rush to side with the Saudis are the latest reminders why it must end.

A manifesto for restrainers. Stephen Walt lists the principles informing the Quincy Institute’s advocacy for foreign policy restraint.

The burn pit is the new Agent Orange of our era. Kelley Vlahos continues her reporting on the toxic burn pits that are wrecking the health of tens of thousands of American veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Survey finds Afghans want U.S. troops to leave. Adam Wunische reports on the findings of the Asia Foundation’s Survey of the Afghan People.

TAC contributor Gil Barndollar calls attention to the damage that endless war is doing to the military:

The president has been rightly excoriated for these pardons, which dishonor the U.S. military and may degrade good order and discipline. But amid this uproar, Americans should note the bigger lesson: Endless wars, especially endless counterinsurgency or counterterrorism wars, slowly chip away at both a military’s ethics and its critical war-fighting skills.

These wars are particularly corrosive because they cannot be conclusively won, and for every enemy that is destroyed it seems as if two or three more appear to replace it. Futile, open-ended wars contribute to breakdowns in discipline. Barndollar continues:

However, keeping their honor clean becomes harder and harder the longer these wars drag on. Wars among the people, as all our endless wars now are, are inherently dirty. When even senior members of the foreign policy establishment concede that we are not seeking victory in Afghanistan, it becomes harder for soldiers to make hollow mission accomplishment a higher priority than self-preservation. Treating U.S. soldiers like victims, as Trump implicitly does, also becomes more common.

When a war cannot be won, the rational thing to do would be to stop fighting it, but instead of doing that our political and military leaders treat endless war as a new normal that must not be questioned. It is bad enough when a government sends its soldiers to fight and die for a cause that it pretends can still be won when that isn’t possible, but to keep sending them over and over again into war zones to fight a war they admit is futile has to be discouraging and frustrating. This also has to widen the division between the military and the civilian population. While military personnel are called on to go on multiple tours in pointless conflicts, most people back home mouth empty platitudes about supporting the troops and do nothing to bring the wars to an end. The public’s failure to hold our political and military leaders accountable for these failed and unnecessary wars is bound to have corrosive effects as well.

At the same time, these wars degrade the military’s ability to fight other adversaries:

Even more serious for American national security is the fact that endless small wars degrade a military’s ability to fight and win big wars — wars that have real consequences for our security and way of life.

Our endless wars have been enormously costly. It is estimated that all of the wars of the last twenty years will end up costing at least $6.4 trillion, and beyond that they have consumed our government’s attention and resources to the detriment of everything else. Our political and military leaders perpetuate these wars, and the public has allowed them to do this, because they are still laboring under the faulty assumption that the U.S. is being made more secure in the process. The reality is that endless wars are undermining our security, weakening the military, and creating more enemies. They should be ended responsibly, but they must end.

As if to prove the point that I was making yesterday, The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump may be sending as many as 14,000 more troops to the Persian Gulf as part of his bankrupt Iran policy:

The Trump administration is considering a significant expansion of the U.S. military footprint in the Middle East, including dozens more ships, other military hardware and as many as 14,000 additional troops to counter Iran, U.S. officials said.

The deployment could double the number of U.S. military personnel who have been sent to the region since the start of a troop buildup in May. President Trump is expected to make a decision on the new deployments as soon as this month, those officials said.

Mr. Trump, facing an election next year, has long sought to exit foreign entanglements and avoid new conflicts. But on Iran—and partly at the behest of Israel—he is convinced of the need to counter the threat his aides say Tehran poses, the officials said. He also could approve a smaller U.S. deployment, the officials said.

Sending more troops to the Middle East as part of the Iran obsession encapsulates much of what is wrong with Trump’s foreign policy. It is both unnecessary and dangerous, and it flows from the president’s own previous bad decisions. Trump is responsible for creating the heightened tensions with Iran with his relentless economic warfare against the country, and then in response to the crisis that he created he expands the U.S. military presence that makes a conflict more likely. None of this would have happened had Trump not reneged on the JCPOA and reimposed sanctions. Each new deployment further escalates the situation and makes it more difficult for both governments to find an off-ramp in the event of a clash.

Putting more ships and personnel in the Persian Gulf makes what is already a potentially explosive situation more dangerous by increasing the chances of accidents and misunderstandings. Increasing the U.S. presence in the region will likely cause the Iranian government to take its own corresponding measures that could be misconstrued or otherwise used as a pretext for war. The lack of any regular channels between our governments makes the possibility of escalation following an incident much more likely. At best, it is a waste of resources and it puts thousands more Americans at greater risk for no good reason.

The Trump administration’s fixation on Iran is out of all proportion to Iranian power. The military buildup in the region that we have seen this year is also completely at odds with the president’s rhetoric about bringing troops home. Instead of bringing troops home, he continues to send them abroad for the sake of an irrational obsession that has nothing to do with keeping the United States secure.

Robin Wright reports on the many failures of Trump administration “diplomacy”:

The list of failures gets longer by the month—and increasingly dangerous for the President. As the campaign season heats up in January, vitriol is sure to focus on his diplomatic shortfalls.

Trump is heading into an election year with no meaningful foreign policy successes to his name. That might not be such a liability if he had anything else to run on, but since he has devoted a considerable portion of his presidency to his foreign policy initiatives the lack of positive results is a problem for him. When we consider that the trade wars he started are inflicting a lot of damage on many of the same constituencies that supported him in 2016, his inability to secure agreements on anything will likely have an impact on his reelection prospects. Perhaps the biggest political threat to Trump is the destruction of his unearned reputation as a dealmaker. That is supposed to be the one thing that he knows how to do, and he has demonstrated time after time that he doesn’t know the first thing about international negotiations.

He has no respect for diplomacy, and he doesn’t understand how diplomacy works, so it is not surprising that he is so bad at it. Instead of securing new agreements, he has squandered a real opportunity with North Korea, and he has deliberately stoked tensions with Iran. He foolishly took ownership of a regime change effort in Venezuela that has yielded nothing but more suffering for people in Venezuela. For all of his empty blather about building a better relationship with Russia, he has scuttled one arms control treaty with Moscow and seems determined to scrap New START as well. His signature move of reneging on agreements in an attempt to force more concessions from other parties has consistently backfired and left the U.S. in a worse position than when he started. Trump has shown that he can burn down the diplomatic achievements of others, but all that the U.S. has to show for his efforts is ashes and smoke.

It is a truism that most voters don’t vote on foreign policy as such, but they do judge incumbent presidents on their record and they tend to punish presidents who are and are perceived to be ineffectual and incompetent. Trump’s failure to deliver on anything he has promised is presumably going to be held against him. I imagine that most voters will recognize that his threats and bluster gain the U.S. nothing.

There is a congealing conventional wisdom around sending military assistance to Ukraine that is as absurd as can be, and it cropped up again this morning:

“Fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here” was extremely stupid when applied to terrorism. It is much more stupid when applied to Russia, and shows how impoverished the FP thinking of even bright, engaged Americans is. My goodness.

— Justin Logan (@JustinTLogan) December 4, 2019

It is discouraging to see that one of the dumbest talking points from the Bush era has returned. “Fight them there” was always a silly justification for waging unnecessary wars in other countries, and now it is being repurposed to justify the questionable policy of throwing weapons at a conflict in Europe. When it was used in the context of Bush-era wars, it was an attempt to make what were clearly wars of choice seem as though they were unavoidable. When a government needs to defend a bad policy, it will usually claim that they have no choice but to do what they are doing. When Bush and his allies used this rhetoric, they were trying to spin a war of aggression as an act of self-defense. Now it is part of an even more ludicrous effort to make supplying weapons and other military assistance to Ukraine seem as if it is vitally important to the U.S. Simply put, this is propaganda, and it isn’t even very good propaganda at that.

I have written many times why I think it is a mistake to arm Ukraine. It just encourages escalation at worst and the prolongation of the conflict at best. Until recently, the arguments in favor of doing this have not been very compelling, but at least they weren’t quite so mindless. Needless to say, Russia’s conflict with Ukraine is a local one, and the U.S. doesn’t have much at stake in that conflict. Ukrainians aren’t fighting Russia and its proxies on our behalf or to prevent them from attacking someone else, but for the sake of their own country. If Russia hawks insist on providing Ukraine with weapons and other assistance, they should at least be able to acknowledge that this is a peripheral interest of the United States. Exaggerating the importance of this policy to U.S. security just calls attention to how little it matters to U.S. security.

Obviously, we aren’t going to be fighting the Russians “here” no matter what happens in this conflict. These are the sorts of irrational claims that we get after decades of irresponsible threat inflation and mistakenly assuming that every conflict in the world is somehow our business.

Today is the official launch of the Quincy Institute, a think tank dedicated to peace and restraint in U.S. foreign policy. I wish our colleagues the best of luck with their work. The Quincy Institute has already provoked a lot of healthy and necessary debate about the future of U.S. foreign policy, and with their impressive roster of experts I am sure that they will be making a major contribution to reorienting our foreign policy away from militarism and endless war. QI has assembled some outstanding scholars from a number of different fields, and most of them will probably be familiar to TAC readers.

Today is also the debut of their publication, Responsible Statecraft, and the first new piece on the site is a “manifesto for restrainers” by Stephen Walt. Walt outlines the goals of advocates for restraint in terms of what we are seeking rather than just listing what we oppose. He makes clear that advocates of restraint champion international engagement, but it is engagement that is focused on commerce and diplomacy.

Advocates of restraint want the U.S. to have fewer security commitments, but that in turn means taking the remaining commitments more seriously:

Restrainers believe the United States should pledge itself to defending another country–and thereby risking the lives of its troops—only when doing so will make a direct and significant contribution to U.S. security and prosperity, and when these obligations command broad support from the American people. Carefully considered commitments will be more credible, because both allies and adversaries can see for themselves why it is in the U.S. national interest to live up to them.

In short, restrainers want the United States to define its interests more narrowly but defend those interests more vigorously.

A strategy of restraint assumes that most of America’s current commitments aren’t necessary for our security, and that will force us to set priorities and focus only on those commitments that affect our vital interests. Security guarantees are not something that should be given out easily or often, and by making too many commitments the U.S. stretches itself too thin, wastes limited resources on unnecessary conflicts, and distracts itself from the relative few commitments that genuinely matter for keeping the U.S. secure.

Walt also calls for avoiding the excessive attachment of “special” relationships and maintaining relations with as many states as possible, including the states that we have shunned for decades:

No two states have identical interests, and no U.S. allies are so valuable or virtuous to deserve generous U.S. support no matter what they do. Restrainers believe the U.S. should support its allies when doing so makes the United States more secure or prosperous, and distance itself from those allies when they act in ways that are contrary to our interests and values.

Restrainers also want the United States to maintain diplomatic relations with acknowledged adversaries, both to facilitate cooperation on issues where our interests overlap and to maximize U.S. leverage.

This necessarily means that there will always be some “daylight” between the U.S. and its allies and clients, and it also implies that the U.S. will be prepared to downgrade relations with other states when our interests no longer converge. At the same time, it leaves the door open to constructive cooperation even with adversaries on occasion. This recognizes that refusing to have diplomatic ties with other states puts the U.S. at a disadvantage by eliminating the possibility of having influence, and it acknowledges that these relationships are not ends in themselves but are meant to advance U.S. interests.

Walt goes on to describe the kind of diplomacy that advocates of restraint favor:

Restrainers believe diplomacy should take center stage in the conduct of America’s foreign relations and that sanctions and the threat or use of force should be our last resort rather than our first impulse. They recognize that many of America’s greatest foreign policy successes—the Marshall Plan, the Bretton Woods economic order, the peaceful reunification of Germany, etc.—were won not on a battlefield but across a negotiating table. A more restrained foreign policy strives for mutually beneficial agreements with other countries, rather than trying to dictate to them.

The implication here is that a restrained foreign policy isn’t going to make far-reaching and unrealistic demands on pain of economic devastation. This is an acknowledgment that any lasting diplomatic agreement has to be based on a compromise that benefits all parties, and it is not something that can be imposed through coercion and threats. A restrained foreign policy is necessarily a less intrusive and overbearing one, and that means that the U.S. won’t be making laundry lists that demand that other states completely overhaul their own policies.

Perhaps the most important part of the manifesto is Walt’s appeal for the U.S. to live up to our own ideals by eschewing the illegal and destructive behavior of the last twenty years:

For restrainers, promoting liberal values abroad begins by setting a good example at home. Using American power to remake the world has led to illegal wars, excessive government secrecy, targeted killings, the deaths of thousands of innocent foreign civilians, and repeated violations of U.S. and international law. At the same time, it has squandered vast resources that could have been used to build a better society here in the United States, and distracted Americans from the efforts needed to improve our own institutions.

As our foreign policy has become increasingly militarized and intrusive around the world, our government has employed increasingly illiberal and intrusive measures at home. The threat inflation and fear-mongering that have driven our endless wars have also corroded our constitutional system by letting presidents launch wars at will without debate or accountability. The waging of these wars has meant trampling on human rights and aligning ourselves with some of the greatest human rights abusers on the planet, and it has meant running roughshod over the laws that were intended to preserve international peace and security. No nation can be perpetually at war without being corrupted by that warfare, and if we want to preserve a free and representative government in the United States we need peace and restraint.

Lack of success in taking power and a corruption scandal have further weakened Juan Guaido’s position:

Last month, Guaido struggled to launch a new wave of street protests. Attendance was a fraction of the crowds he drew earlier this year.

His flagging momentum has caused some of his fellow lawmakers to start jostling for a new leadership battle, though most have not yet started criticizing him publicly, according to interviews with analysts and politicians.

“The political reality we have had in Venezuela for the last 10 months has finished,” said Dimitris Pantoulas, a Caracas-based political analyst. “It’s the end of this era of harmony and unity.”

It has been more than ten months since Guaido laid claim to the title of interim president of Venezuela, and in that time his support in the country has dwindled and Maduro and his allies appear to be firmly entrenched in power. No matter how many times foreign governments say that they recognize him as Venezuela’s leader, the fact that he has no real control over anything in the country has been a crippling flaw in the effort to depose Maduro. Guaido’s popular support has taken quite a hit over the course of the year, and the corruption scandal involving opposition legislators from his party will probably cause it to keep dropping:

Meanwhile, Maduro’s grip on power seems to be strengthening. According to local pollster Datanalisis, Guaido’s support had already dipped from 61% in February to 42% in November – before news of the scandal broke.

Guaido’s support was already waning because he has proven unable to deliver what he promised. Even though he does not appear to be personally involved in the alleged corruption, it reflects badly on his party and his leadership. The scandal has disillusioned many Venezuelans and battered Guaido’s reputation:

To a dozen Venezuelans interviewed by Reuters around the country, the scandal has marked another blow to Guaido’s reputation and to their hopes of seeing the back of the deeply unpopular Maduro, who has presided over a five-year economic crisis and an expanding authoritarian state.

For Mario Silva, an engineer waiting by a bus stop in the crumbling western city of Maracaibo, it was time to move on. “Guaido missed his moment,” the 60-year-old said.

The longer that Maduro holds on to power, the more likely it is that Guaido’s support will continue to erode. At some point, our government and Guaido’s other backers have to reconsider a regime change policy that was based entirely on wishful thinking. We also need to recognize that using the blunt, indiscriminate weapon of economic warfare on an entire country to force political change is wrong. The U.S. needs to rescind the broad sanctions that have been punishing the Venezuelan people, and there needs to be an oil-for-food program created with safeguards to prevent it from fueling more corruption. As U.S. sanctions exacerbate what was already a serious economic and humanitarian crisis, how much longer will the U.S. and other regional governments keep pursuing the goal of regime change at the expense of the civilian population?