THE COLUMN: Minding Our Own Business

In his Farewell Address of 1796, George Washington famously advised his own and future generations of Americans to avoid large military establishments and foreign entanglements, especially in wars that have nothing to do with America's vital interests. 

While then every part of our country thus feels an immediate and particular interest in union, all the parts combined cannot fail to find in the united mass of means and efforts greater strength, greater resource, proportionably greater security from external danger, a less frequent interruption of their peace by foreign nations... Hence likewise they will avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty...

Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice? It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world...

Just three years later, Napoleon Bonaparte seized control of France in the wake of the French Revolution, and all Europe promptly tore itself apart. A complex system of alliances sprang up to punish the interloper and fight him every step of the way, from the war of the Third Coalition in 1803 to the Battle of Borodino and Leipzig in 1812/13, and culminating in the final victory at Waterloo in 1815. Because no single continental nation was strong enough to confront the Little Corporal and the Grande Armée alone, they fought in shifting tandems. The upending of multiple royal houses and heads of states served as a vivid reminder to presidents Adams, Jefferson, and Madison of Washington's wisdom.

Now forgotten, alas. The warning against a large standing army faded away in the aftermath of World War II, and by the Cold War it was totally gone. In an effort to block Soviet expansionism, the armed forces became permanent, the intelligence agencies -- things "particularly hostile to republican liberty" -- mushroomed, official Washington expanded and the intrusive bureaucracy of the Deep State was born. Equally memory-holed has been the admonition against foreign entanglements and the avoidance of Europe's royalty-driven, congenital, familial grievances. 

And yet here we are, embroiled in a fan-dance proxy war for no apparent strategic reason with the rump remnants of the old USSR while simultaneously keeping on eye on China and its territorial ambitions regarding Taiwan. Ostensibly at issue is America's declared interest in democratic self-governance around the globe, which was unfortunately given official status in George W. Bush's second inaugural address: "So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."

Such fuzzy moral do-gooderism, however has no place in the rational administration of what must be an amoral state. As the old saying goes, nations have no friends, only temporary alliances; statecraft, as Talleyrand demonstrated during the post-Napoleonic re-ordering of Europe, is not a sewing circle. He had been Napoleon's friend and senior administrator; by the time of the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15 he had switched sides and planned for the Bourbon restoration. The rightness or wrongness of a cause mattered little or nothing: the desired diplomatic outcome was all that counted.

What makes the problems of the Ukraine and Taiwan even thornier is that neither has a valid pretense to administrative independence. Instead, both real or prospective conflicts are among the last sortings-out of two civil wars. After the defeat of the Kuomintang government under Chiang Kai-Shek by Mao's Communists in 1949, the Nationalists retreated to the island of Formosa (today called Taiwan) whose native inhabitants had gradually been displaced by Han Chinese over several hundred years, and proclaimed it to be the Republic of China. Unsurprisingly, the Chinese Communist Party regards Taiwan as its territory, part of "One China," and nobody really cares what the indigenous natives think.

Under Jimmy Carter in 1979, the U.S. formally recognized the CCP and the People's Republic of China as the official government of the country. Although the Republic of China had been a founding member of the U.N. and one of the five permanent members of the Security Council, it was displaced in 1971 and its seat given to the communists.

For its part, the Ukraine has a long and complicated history with Russia, most recently as a province and a fictional "state" member of the USSR and the breadbasket of Russia. It is home to the city of Kiev, where the Kievan Rus began, and is regarded by many Russian as the birthplace of their Motherland. Widely viewed as one of the most corrupt places in Europe, it has a recent history of hinky elections and at the moment under president Volodymyr Zelensky is governed via martial law. Zelensky has also banned the Russian Orthodox Church in the Ukraine, an outrage that, like his cavalier abandonment of democracy and his insistence on prolonging the armed conflict with Russia in the hopes that the Americans and Europeans will continue to bail him out -- and, many say, to enrich him personally -- contributes to deep suspicion about his motives. 

President Trump has been repeatedly frustrated in his attempts to get a peace deal between the warring ethnic and linguistic cousins, delivering a humiliating dressing-down to Zelensky during his February visit to the White House, and recently chastising Putin as "crazy." But the Ukraine-Russian war is not likely to prove amenable to that thing beloved of diplomats, a "negotiated settlement." Both sides understand the reality of warfare: if you're negotiating, you're losing. 

Putin's goal, meanwhile, is not a Napoleonic conquest of Europe as some of the most ardent Ukrainian supporters in the U.S. charge, but the at least partial restoration of former components of the USSR  that have historically been Russian: principally Russia itself, Belarus (which has already been "Finlandized") , and the Ukraine. the former KGB officer is, after all, a man who watched his country get shot out from underneath him when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and the Soviet Union was abolished in 1991 and is still trying to make sense of it. He has also said that he regards talk of admitting the Ukraine to NATO and perhaps the European Union as a red line and a casus belli -- which given the tenor of some American criticism and the fact that the Ukraine abuts Russia -- is true.

On the other side of the globe, China notices the parlous state of the U.S. Navy and carefully assays its chances of an armed takeover of the island. Historically, the Chinese have been almost uniquely inept at the art of warfare -- Sun Tzu's famous book advises duplicity and subterfuge rather than confrontation -- and its record against both Japan and the West is a long string of unmitigated defeats. The only people the Chinese can beat, it seems, is themselves, as they have done for centuries and with spectacularly bloody results -- which bodes ill for Taiwan. 

In both cases, the U.S. should pull back. Regarding Taiwan, America needs to find another option to the Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and other Taiwanese chip manufacturers, who account for about half of chip production worldwide. (Rebuilding the U.S. chip industry is one purpose of the tariff regimen, and should be clearly explained as such.) There's not much the Navy can do to stop the mainland's invasion of Taiwan short of dragging the U.S. into a shooting war with the CCP, and the loss of the island would not be a crushing blow to American military interests in East Asia.

As for Russia, the current mess can be directly laid at the feet of Bush 43's predecessor, his father George H.W. Bush, on whose watch the American victory in the Cold War was squandered. Russia could have been bought for pennies on the dollar and brought into the West with timely investment and political reform. Instead, sensing a vacuum, it was taken over by KGB ronin like Putin and mercantile gangsters who had already been feasting on the corpse of the USSR even before it was dead. The only beneficiary of America's failure to capitalize on the triumph of its primary foreign policy objective of the forty years between 1949 and 1989 has turned out to be George Soros.

Washington concluded his address with these words: "In offering to you, my countrymen, these counsels of an old and affectionate friend, I dare not hope they will make the strong and lasting impression I could wish—that they will control the usual current of the passions, or prevent our nation from running the course which has hitherto marked the destiny of nations. But if I may even flatter myself that they may be productive of some partial benefit, some occasional good, that they may now and then recur to moderate the fury of party spirit, to warn against the mischiefs of foreign intrigue, to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism—this hope will be a full recompense for the solicitude for your welfare, by which they have been dictated."

By George, he's right.