Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
- 19
- 1
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
A small but I think interesting speculative, tentative (both of these things because it's honestly too soon to tell how these things will ultimately play out) note on Recent Events, first with Venezuela and (perhaps?) secondly with Iran: the "Donroe Doctrine" in practice is avoiding a specific fail state of the neoconservative (or US-led international rules-based order or whatever you'd like to call it) modus operandi.
Specifically, the Donroe Doctrine has been to avoid creating a power vacuum that could be filled by forces unknown. Instead, coercive diplomacy is applied to weaken a regime, but rather than attempting to topple the regime's leadership, the coercive diplomacy is then treated as leverage in an ongoing series of negotiations.
You can see this most clearly in Venezuela - even though that operation involved seizing the leader of the country, Trump's strategy obviously was not to pursue the removal of the rump regime. Instead he preferred to negotiate with it. Now with Iran, with potentially regime-shattering protests apparently in play, it seems that the Donroe Doctrine might be to the hang the threat of removal over the head of the regime to induce preferred behavior rather than intervene directly. (Watch me jinx things and airstrikes happen as soon as I push the "comment" button.)
If you look back past the raid in Venezuela, you can see signs of this as well. Trump was comfortable drone-striking Qasem Soleimani, but not as part of a scheme to overthrow the government of Iran. Trump has always talked about working with Putin (or Xi, or Kim Jong Un, or what have you) even when he was taking direct adverse action against them (most notably against Putin).
I suppose there are a number of things one could say about this, but one observation I think I would make is that this is not new way of doing things, and in fact it's been practiced quite recently ("stop doing this or we will launch another 50 Tomahawks at you" is a pretty typical message for US presidents to send), so it's not an innovation per se. At the same time, in the recent past, there did seem to be a general vibe of "we want to remove the bad guys and let the good guys take over" even if we were only engaging in coercive diplomacy, and that vibe seems less present now.
The other one is that this way of doing things is actually well suited to a world where the US status as a superpower is challenged. Paradoxically, as the days of monopolarity slip into the rear view mirror, instances of US gunboat diplomacy may proliferate. This is for (at least) two reasons: firstly, as soft power slips away, the US will need to exercise more hard power to maintain credibility. Secondly, nation-building is an expensive and long-term commitment. Black-bagging dictators really isn't! By plentiful use of coercive diplomacy, the US might be able to achieve far-reaching effects at much less cost, letting it focus more budgetary effort on areas of major geopolitical focus.
Finally, I think there's a clear danger here: if you have a successful string of black-bagging, drone-striking, or otherwise exercising coercive diplomacy against people who annoy you, it can grow intoxicating and seductive. This is obviously a threat of nation-building as well, but a string of quick, cheap, successful operations can lead very quickly to an expensive failure if you keep rolling the dice. And, well, Donald knows better than anyone: nobody likes to lose.
But I'm curious if this sketch rings true to others. What am I missing?
Where the acquisition of Greenland fits in. I get the idea that having access to Greenland would be strategically advantageous for the United States, it just seems a weird drum to bang on. And no, there is no military action in Greenland as there is in Iran and Venezuela, but it is a sovereign country and Trump has made noises about how "We need Greenland." How does that fit in the "Donroe" Doctrine?
I'm going to go with a perhaps controversial opinion here and say there is no doctrine here at all, Trump is acting opportunistically and for his own reasons that range from a a simplistic and transactional view of geopolitics down to petty ego. He's surrounded by yes men and getting high on the news coverage of himself, it seems most likely he's seen information about resource deposits and decided he has to have it, plus securing his place in history as a US President that expanded the nations borders with a big chunk of land.
The only "doctrine" you might be able to find will come from the courtiers whispering into his ear, trying to aim the loose cannon roughly at problems they want dealt with, but even then that's going to be filtered through Trumps own strange lens and more probably than not there will be different parties trying to push him in different directions.
This Greenland stuff is madness, there's no reasonable justification for it from a military or political standpoint, anything the US wants from Greenland they almost certainly could have negotiated for and gotten without any real hassle and certainly without threatening the existence of NATO and setting off alarm bells in Europe.
I was going to post something similar about Trump not having any coherently formulated foreign policy but I think you can still make the argument that his various decisions do reflect an underlying pattern, even if that pattern is purely reflective of his psychological profile rather than an explicitly thought-out philosophy. Whether the most appropriate word for this is doctrine or something else is maybe a different discussion.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link