Sep 1, 2020 crunchicrant -

Grading the administration: world role

President Trump, it must be deduced, is an isolationist.

There is no big picture foreign policy of the United States (or none that Crunchicrant can discern), other than to reduce involvement in, and commitment to, foreign ventures (where there has been limited success – but we are still ‘in’ Afghanistan and Iraq and pretty much every other place we have had a past presence).

The administration has been active as regards

Iran: where it has pursued a policy, independent of its allies, of economically isolating that country and coercing it to denuclearize (without success, yet).
Israel: where it is pursuing a policy to get remote (non contiguous) Arab countries to recognize Israel, and at the same time support of settlement in the west bank territories – significance to a final settlement, unknown.

Other ‘hot spots’ – Afghanistan; China-Taiwan/Xingxiang; Iraq; Korean peninsular; Syria; Tigre; Ukraine/Crimea; Venezuela; Yemen – little activity, apparently.

President Trump has stated that he does want security and strong defenses. But he has made strong defense synonymous with big defense spend and a big military- army and national guard force numbers, marine battalion numbers, naval ship and air force aircraft number targets were promised: these are surely the wrong metrics in this age.

Our (expensive) security resources [Defense spend], in particular our military, have been built to support an active foreign policy that faced down communism and guaranteed free flow of oil from the middle east. These are receding concerns.

Absent from the story of the administration is new thinking about defense and security, rising threats and appropriate responses: Crunchicrant worries about unconventional and asymmetric attacks and does not see resourcing to counter them.

One such threat (the COVID pandemic) hit us from left field, early this year.

A part of the inward turn has been a desire to secure our borders and curb undocumented immigration: a policy to be achieved by building the US-Mexico “wall”. The flow of undocumented immigrants into the US may have slowed significantly, but in what part this is due to Trump administration policy, and what part to the effects of COVID-19, is not known.

Crunchicrant does not understand the administration’s methodology for securing the border and reducing undocumented immigration and can only conclude that the main interest is in ‘appearing’ to want to secure the border, not actually doing so.

If we wanted to actually reduce undocumented immigration to a trickle, we would:
– Create a rational and efficient legal immigration process – laws and administrative/judicial resources to make sure that a legal immigration system is working

– Make sure that ‘E-Verify’, the existing federal program which requires employers to check immigration status of potential employees has real teeth by fining employers heavily for employing undocumented workers: so heavily that employers will never employ undocumented workers.

– Develop programs with countries from which immigrants originate to provide better opportunity (including security) in those countries, so people do not feel a need to immigrate into the US.

– Get people on the ground in areas from which immigrants originate and provide propaganda budgets so that US government policy with regard to undocumented immigration, and the message that it will be impossible to get a job, are widely understood in those communities.

AND, last and least

– Do more to secure a border which must already be one of the securest in the world.

Crunchicrant grades based on clarity of strategy – whether there is clarity about the US’s role in the world and whether the foreign and defense/security strategies are joined up and make sense: our role in the world is unclear, foreign strategy is not well founded, defense/security strategy is (therefore) adrift. Meanwhile policy towards controlling the border looks muscular but is not smart.