With the departure of Steve Bannon, American president has been reborn
It seems President Donald Trump has sworn twice, first at January 20, 2017, and second at August 21, 2017. It’s the second, an address of a revising of American strategy over Afghanistan that made him the authentic president to lead America and the global community. The global architecture has been redrawn, but the implementation is yet to be unfolded.
Through thick and thin along the relationship between Thailand and the US since Roberts Treaty of 1833, American doppelgänger is not a new thing (see also civil unrest in America), considering a story of Jim Thompson and Willis Bird on CIA’s activities during the anticommunist hysteria phase in cold war era in Thailand. Jim Thompson had focused on his ideal and sympathy toward Pridi Banomyong, the archenemy of the Thai royalists, while the pragmatic Bird had chosen to help the Thai elites to establish the “Narasuan Committee”, turning into the “shadow government” and a space to cooperate with American intelligence operatives and quietly manage Thailand’s and Southeast Asia’s untidy politics. Bird could profit from this new America’s stance on supporting for the military regime, and Thompson had chosen the new path to build a very successful Thai silk industry, and thus a legendary until nowadays.
Bird saw much the same. One intelligence operative who worked closely with Bird for years remembered that he had constantly criticized the prosecution of the Vietnam War and predicted it would ultimately end in defeat. “But Bird would say that as long as we’re having this war, he should be involved.”
In private, Thompson began to disdain Bill Bird, calling him a traitor to old OSS friends, even a murderer for helping the Thai generals track down Pridi’s old allies. Thomson vowed never to help Bird out again, and he warned his friends not to get involved with any of Bird’s arm deals. (“The Ideal Man: The Tragedy of Jim Thompson and The American Way of War”, Joshua Kurlantzick, page 96)
Understand Steve Bannon’s ideology and American politics
There are debates on whether or not America can continue its global hegemony in the 21st century, although it has followed the steps of “The course of Empire” (1833–36) series of painting (before that it was The Rise of the Carthaginian Empire by J. M. W. Turner in 1815.) or Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah (1377) of the rise and fall of dynasties, perhaps follows history of the Imperial Crisis (AD 235–284) or The Crisis of the Third Century and especially The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. Among these, “The Rise and Fall of The Great Powers” from Paul Kennedy seems to produce the originate idea behind the camp whom believes on the declining of American power. Another critical contribution comes from “World-system theory” camp, such as Immanuel Wallerstein. While most realists, such as John J Mearsheimer and Joseph Nye seem to believe in the other way round. There are variance in producing direction and guidance to avoid such declining, depends on different school of thought, such as “How the mighty fall”, New America’s political reform, “The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s secret strategy to replace America as the global superpower”, “The Rise and Fall of Nations”, and “Political Order and Political Decay”. Some scholars may point to the extent that America may pursue Monroe doctrine and left the global affair, such as “Asia Alone: The Dangerous Post-Crisis Divide from America”, “At Our Own Peril: DoD Risk Assessment in a Post-Primacy World”, and “The Post-American World”. Please note that Trump’s presidential campaign, “Make America Great Again” has resonated this line of narrative, quite different from “Hillary for America/Strong Together” or “Obama’s hope”.
Although one cause of the declining has been from the global terrorism, symbolized with the event of 9/11 Attacks by Al-Qaeda, but the fundamental problem is about American economy.
The nowadays global economy is the product of the meeting at Bretton Woods in 1944, spearheaded and driven by people like Sir John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White, and later San Francisco conference in 1945. (The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948 was another important principle.) There was a debate between John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich von Hayek. The latter’s thinking, influenced from the Vienna circle and the Viennese coffee house culture, an introduction of Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) has replaced Keynes’ economic policy type of “The New Deal”, starting with the connecting between Milton Friedman and Barry Morris Goldwater, both had admired Hayek’s, and thus a meeting of Friedman and Governer Ronald Reagan in Los Angeles in 1967.
Only in the 1930s did the term neoliberalism start to appear in multiple contexts, eventually to become established as the main designation of a new intellectual/political movement. The broadest discussion took place in France around 1935. A loose group of economists, philosophers, and sociologists located in Paris organized the Colloque Walter Lippmann (CWL), which is often regarded as the precursor of the MPS. Yet another important country that simultaneously gave birth to neoliberalism was Germany, where Walter Eucken, Alexander Rüstow, and Wilhelm Röpke discussed the tasks of a “new liberalism” on the eve of the Nazis’ rise to power. Significantly for later developments, Rüstow explicitly called for a “liberal interventionism”. The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective , pp.12
Friedman had advised and been a witness with the Nixon shock of ending of Bretton Woods fixed-currency system in August 1971. It was Reagan and Thatcher to introduce a full scale Hayek’s idea and a coincide with the end of cold war. The introducing of “Reinventing Government” by David Osborne and Ted Gaebler, heavily influenced by Peter Drucker’s “The Age of Discontinuity” and also an introducing of the public choice theory by James Buchanan in “The Calculus of Consent”, and later the adopting in public administration by Vincent Ostrom and Elinor Ostrom, the Bloomington school of political economy. These altogether have created what we call the “Washington Consensus” (ฉันทมติวอชิงตัน) or sometimes labeled as “Neoliberalism” by the left intellectuals.
At this point, the term “Neoliberalism” has been absurdly changed from the original meaning coined by Freiberg School of political economists (see ORDO journal) such as Alexander Rüstow trying to attach it with social market economy (SOME) or Rhine capitalism contra a tendency of a rising of Nazi, and been ambiguously enhanced further by Michel Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics. See a criticism from this paper: “Neo-liberalism has become one of the boom concepts of our time. From its original reference point as a descriptor of the economics of the ‘Chicago School’ or authors such as Friedrich von Hayek, neo-liberalism has become an all-purpose concept, explanatory device and basis for social critique,” “Gane has argued that Foucault experienced a crisis in his own thoughts about biopolitics, and had ultimately identified it as a conceptual dead-end,” and “neo-liberalism is understood through a synthesis of neo-Marxist critiques of political economy with the later work of Michel Foucault on governmentality and liberal political rationality.” Despite an intellectual crisis led to the dead-end in Foucault’s biopolitics, but it paves the way to the possible diversity within capitalism, roughly defined by government intervention (more on government ownership rather than price control), to more boarder categorization in Peter A. Hall and David Soskice (or H&S)’s Varieties of Capitalism (VoC). Other economic systems are “Tony Blair’s Third Way, French dirigisme, the Dutch polder model, the Nordic model, Japanese corporate capitalism and the contemporary Chinese model.” Dirk Akkermansa, Carolina Castaldib and Bart Los (ACL) have suggested that H&S’s empirical analysis is flawed especially in radical innovation found in Liberal Market Economies (LME) more than Coordinated Market Economies (CME), but instead, radical innovations have broaden among economic system. Generally, “LMEs roughly specialized in radical innovations in industries related to chemicals and electronics, while CMEs did so in machinery and transport equipment industries,” but Mixed Market Economies (MMEs), sometimes referred to as the countries representing the ‘Mediterranean’ variety of capitalism will be better specialized in the category of “Original” products, (which means highly cultural and creative industry?) The paper has observed empirical study on countries as follow: LMEs: Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, UK and US; CMEs: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland; MMEs: France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Turkey.
While Martin R. Schneider and Mihai Paunescu have suggested that economic system clusters can change from time to time from State-dominated economies, CMEs, Hybrid economies, LME-like economies to LMEs. Another report from Tariq H.Malik shows that “MMEs are at a disadvantage regarding publications, patents and exports. However, MMEs perform better than LMEs and CMEs in the transformation of national science into exported products from high R&D intensity sectors. At the dyadic level of analysis, individual MMEs are compared with a typical LME (USA) and a typical CME (Germany). This comparison shows that some MMEs perform better than the USA and Germany.”
The challenge that Foucault was presenting to his audience in the 1978–79 Collège de France lectures, in his detailed explication of the rise of neo-liberalism as a governmental rationality, was whether the political left was as capable of such innovations in governmental practice and institutional frameworks to develop such a ‘different capitalism’, that would not be reliant upon the received authority of conformity to texts, instead trying to ‘define for itself its way of doing things and its way of governing’
Generally, it seems the term has been exploited to make a narrative from the left-wing intellectuals who do not understand economics and public administration, another vague term which is not a deep critical one like “capitalism” from Marx’s attempt on “The Paris Manuscripts” to criticize Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.
According to the logic of Hayek’s Big Idea, these expressions of human subjectivity are meaningless without ratification by the market — as Friedman said, they are nothing but relativism, each as good as any other. When the only objective truth is determined by the market, all other values have the status of mere opinions; everything else is relativist hot air. But Friedman’s “relativism” is a charge that can be thrown at any claim based on human reason. It is a nonsense insult, as all humanistic pursuits are “relative” in a way the sciences are not. They are relative to the (private) condition of having a mind, and the (public) need to reason and understand even when we can’t expect scientific proof. When our debates are no longer resolved by deliberation over reasons, then the whimsies of power will determine the outcome.
This Washington Consensus (mislabeled to be “Neoliberalism”) “order” has been criticized not only from the left, but also from the right, albeit a rhetoric, but conservative must be reinvented, see for example Frank Carlucci listed in “Who runs Washington”. Under this condition, it has encouraged the globalization, and thus a cause of job losses in the short run, and automation as a cause of job losses in the long run. Although, in reality, automation will first destroy jobs in textile industry in countries such as Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Myanmar.
From the subprime mortgage crisis in 2007 – 2010 that has contributed to the U.S. economic recession, while Obama administration on one hand had been trying to bail-out the financial institutes, and enacted the The Dodd–Frank Act, and also strengthening the Basel III, and on the other hand had exercised the Quantitative Easing (QE), thus ruins more treasure status. The U.S. economic performance has not yet been recovered in full, a global deflation problem. Trump has understood well that he could capture voting base in the Rust Belt area, and thus has fueled more American polarization. Steve Bannon, which has joined Breitbart News in March 2012, has cultivated it as a platform for the populism right-wing, Alt-right (some may call it as a far-right), later he had joined Trump’s campaigning team.
It’s not only Breitbart News, but also Robert Mercer. Apart of Breitbart News as a media platform, Mercer has donated and supported to numbers of think tanks such as a climate skepticism, Heartland Institute, and especially Cambridge Analytica. It was Cambridge Analytica to apply “big data” to support a kind of neck to neck competition of campaigns, which required highly precise reach-out to the voting base behind both Brexit and Trump, while Heartland Institute has supported policy initiatives, such as “The Roadmap for the 21st Century Project” which includes Budget & Tax Reform, Health Care Reform, Monetary Policy, Energy Deregulation, Welfare Reform, Education, Social Security and Medicare, National Defense, and Rightsizing Government.
These three platforms: Breitbart News, Cambridge Analytica, and Heartland Institute have efficiently supported the visionary Bannon to project his idea to reform, if not to revolt America. Bannon’s idea is based on the four archetypes: Prophet (Idealist), Nomad (Reactive), Hero (Civic), and Artist (Adaptive) identified in William Strauss and Neil Howe’s “The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy — What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny”, a kind of theory of “eternal return” used to be heavily cited by Nietzsche especially Amor fati in The Gay Science. According to The Strauss–Howe generational theory, the full cycle has been categorized into four phases, each phase has been lasting around 20–22 years, thus 80–90 years for a full cycle, or “saeculum”. Each saeculum will end with either crisis or war, and now we are living in the forth phase of “Millennium saeculum”, which the “great recession” and “war on terror” are the product of this phase.
Bannon may or may not believe in what the far-right, such as Alt-right online culture, and altogether with neo-Nazi advocate about Nietzsche’s “On the Genealogy of Morality” (which may be the wrong interpretation) during the Charlottesville incident. But he belives that we’re now on the verge of a radical transformation, and it’s him to help the catalyst on the process.
Literally, this is the same “trajectory” of Alexander Dugin, the geopolitical advisor for Russian president Vladimir Putin, who believes in the American decline, and the rising of Multipolar world. Bannon called Dugin as a “common struggle”. Russia employs the same tactic to speed up the change and thus the reason behind the support of interference in the 2016 United States elections. Apart of the facilitation on cyber hacking, Russia also supported the “fake news” during the election, and helps creating the related ecosystem. See how ex-Russian toll talked about their “disinformation” campaign and how Russia attacked US election, actually “hacking the U.S. political system was a very emotional, tactical decision. People were very upset about the Panama Papers.” Situation in Libya and Ukraine confirmed Putin’s fearing on the West’s colour revolution style. There were “fancy bear (GRU)” and “cozy bear (FSB)” cooperating the hack. (Now there is a campaign to tracking Russian influence operations on twitter to combat against fake news bots.) A bitter internal Democratic competition between Bernie Sander vs Hillary Clinton deteriorated Democrats more, and gerrymandering could also help. With these combinations, Trump could win the presidential election, but he could not win the major popular vote, thus a capturing of slim margin of voting base and a handicap on exercising a radical politics from the White House.
Running for presidency is the different job from working as the U.S. President
It was Bannon that be a “radical face” for Trump. He (and also Stephen Miller whom working together) helped drafting the inauguration address, he was behind the executive order to ban six muslim-majority countries, and the withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris agreement on climate change. Veritably, from a famous “accidental” photo of Bannon with his whiteboard, there are to-do list yet to be accomplished.
Bannon faced a huge resistance when pushing his radical agenda, while Trump prefers to have choices on policy menu options, or according to his book, “The Art of the Deal”, throwing options up to the air and waiting until reaching the proper choice, although the co-author predicted Trump’s resignation before the end of this year with tougher resistance after his address on Charlottesville incident. Perhaps, Trump has his own unique idea of a consistent anti-Obama agenda, a deeply obligation and deeply realizing of identity political power on American WASP identity (this can explain why Trump recruited James Mattis, despite sometimes Mattis shows his disagreement on Trump’s idea, and Clinton was right to express her hope on breaking another glass ceiling on gender politics) that his advisors should agree and abide by, or the advisors should have artful skill to persuade Trump. Although, Trump has an impressive skill to detect and “calculate probable change in influence and the influential”, a real function of power broker and arbiter in politics, but running the country which requires some degree of unity under a circumstance of deep polarization is not easy. There are a resignation of CEOs from two of his economic advisory councils, the Manufacturing Council & Strategy & Policy Forum, Trump thus has dissolved both. Members of a White House arts panel also resigned as a protest. As a matter of fact, it was Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump to urge Trump to be more moderate on Charlottesville stance. And it was both of them to push Bannon out of the White House. After reading Bannon’s interview on The American Prospect, the last straw after the first offside on giving a controversial interview with TIME, if not to limit Trump’s bargaining chip over North Korea, and thus made Bannon resigned; China may be glad to see an economic combative Bannon to get out from the White House, albeit “the U.S. has initiated an investigation into China’s theft of the U.S. intellectual property (IP) using Section 301 US Trade Act of 1974.”
There is no clear picture on domestic policy and trade war against China, given that Trump has shown dubious stance toward China’s Renminbi policy, parts might be from Kushner’s trying to secure debt service and Trump still has his “hawk” on Chinese policy, such as Peter Navarro, the director of the national trade council, who wrote “Crouching Tiger: What China’s Militarism Means for the World”. Chinese softpower is also growing, however.
But on the foreign policy front, with a strong bond between Trump with people like retired Marine Gen. James Mattis and Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster seem to settle down the core American strategy toward the global terrorism at Afghanistan, and push the cohesiveness in the foreign policy. These generals are smart enough to blend the geopolitical reality with my earlier discussion about Trump’s anti-Obama agenda, expressed as a new Trump’s “strategic accountablity” vis-à-vis Obama’s “strategic patience” toward North Korea.
“My original instinct was to pull out, and historically I like following my instincts. But all my life, I have heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office. In other words, when you are president of the United States. So I studied Afghanistan in great detail and from every conceivable angle. After many meetings over many months, we held our final meeting last Friday at Camp David with my cabinet and generals to complete our strategy. I arrived at three fundamental conclusion about America’s core interests in Afghanistan.
…
“In Afghanistan and Pakistan, America’s interests are clear. We must stop the resurgence of safe havens that enable terrorists to threaten America. And we must prevent nuclear weapons and materials from coming into the hands of terrorists and being used against us or anywhere in the world, for that matter. But to prosecute this war, we will learn from history.
“As a result of our comprehensive review, American strategy in Afghanistan and South Asia will change dramatically in the following ways: A core pillar of our new strategy is a shift from a time-based approach to one based on conditions. I’ve said it many times, how counterproductive it is for the United States to announce in advance the dates we intend to begin or end military options.
“We will not talk about numbers of troops or our plans for further military activities. Conditions on the ground, not arbitrary timetables, will guide our strategy from now on. America’s enemies must never know our plans or believe they can wait us out. I will not say when we are going to attack, but attack we will.
…
“Another critical part of the South Asia strategy for America is to further develop its strategic partnership with India, the world’s largest democracy and a key security and economic partner of the United States. We appreciate India’s important contributions to stability in Afghanistan, but India makes billions of dollars in trade with the United States, and we want them to help us more with Afghanistan, especially in the area of economic assistance and development. We are committed to pursuing our shared objectives for peace and security in South Asia and the broader Indo-Pacific region.”
Typically, strategy in waging war and toward grand strategy since Machiavelli to Hitler (cf. “Grand strategy vs emergent strategy”) among notable names such as: Machiavelli; Vauban; Frederick the Great, Guibert, and Bülow; Jomini; Clausewitz; Adam Smith, Alexander Hamilton and Friedrich List; Engels and Marx; Moltke and Schlieffen; Du Picq and Foch; Bugeaud, Gallieni, and Lyautey; Delbrück; Churchill, Lloyd George, and Clemenceau; Ludendorff; Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin; Maginot and Lidell Hart; Haushofer; Mahan; Douhet, Mitchell, and Seversky; and Hitler, we have two kinds of military tactic, Blitzkrieg (lightning war) for the attacker and attrition warfare (also known as Fabian strategy) for the defender. The revisionist will be enforced to attack the status quo. As a rule, the attacker will use force ratio as 3:1 with the odd of winning at around 73%. But if without abundance of resources, as the revisionist characteristic, Blitzkrieg will be opted as a default tactic. Blitzkrieg will be employed for a flexibility, surprised, and mobility to evade the stronger line of defense from the defender, or at least to avoid a stalemate in the bloody trench warfare such as the Battle of the Somme and the Battle of Verdun (or more recently in Iran-Iraq war), and using a concentration of force at the rear or flank or at the weakness of the adversary, therefore communication and encryption are the key (and also an Achilles’ heel), as of Nazi’s “Enigma” and “Angōki B-gata” (暗号機B型, “Type B Cipher Machine”) of the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN), while QUESS or quantum encryption and quantum teleportation will be the 21st century encryption technique. The Nazi’s Blitzkrieg to triump over French Marginot line was the classical case of this warfare. While in the eastern front, Russia had applied a successful “scorched-earth” policy, or an extreme case of attrition warfare to defend and won over this kind of Nazi’s Blitzkrieg, with helps from the vast territory, the terrible condition in the winter, and the sacrifying of a huge men resources. (Although, overall Axis’ resources are very limited compared to The Allies.) Absolutely, after the decisive victory at the battle of the Battle of Austerlitz (causing a dissolution of the holy Roman empire) and the Battle of Jena and Auerstedt (considered as “the end of history” by Hegel, Russia had applied the same “scorched-earth” tactic to win over Napoleon invasion a which had a costly capturing of Moscow from the Battle of Schöngrabern through the Battle of Borodino. But because of the industrial revolution and an early tactical urban warfare, Russian casualties in the war with the Nazi, especially at Stalingard was thus far higher than the war with Napoleon.
Blitzkrieg is possible because of an advancement of technology over the adversary. But with lacking of advance technology and resources, asymmetric warfare (or sometimes called “Fourth-generation warfare”) will be applied for the revisionist. China’s people war led by Mao Zedong on using both insurgency and psychological operations (PSYOP), and avoiding a direct confrontation until readiness (“韬光养晦, 有所作为” or “Tāo guāng yǎng huì, yǒu suǒ zuò wéi”), ซ่อนงำประกาย หนุนเสริมอำพราง, พัฒนาตนอย่างไม่ย่อท้อ รอเวลาเหมาะสมดอกไม้ผลิบาน, “冷静观察，稳住阵脚，沉着应付，韬光养晦，善于守拙，决不当头。” “observe calmly, secure our position, cope with affairs calmly, hide our capacities and bide our time, be good at maintaining a low profile, and never claim leadership” (see note) after inflicting, bleeding, delegitimizing and demoralizing Chiang Kai-shek’s army, and gradually gaining popular supports over the long run, finally pushing Kaomintang fled to Taiwan suggested by Chang Chi-yun (張其昀) in 1948 rather than retreating to western China, while in the same time, a failed defending of Hainan. Charles M. Cooke, former commander of the Seventh Fleet had advised evacuation both from Hainan and Zhoushan. Habitually, “nationalism” will be the key in this kind of “people warfare”.
Sir Robert Grainger Ker Thompson with the successful experience of Counter Insurgency (COIN) during the Malayan Emergency had criticized American strategy in Vietnam war. Singapore had pursued a different tactics, Operation Coldstore in 1963 to deal with the communists, before that in 1961 Lee Kuan Yew “had made a secret alliance with Fong Chong Pik, the leader of the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM), to get the CPM cadres to support the PAP in the by-election.” While in Thailand, with an abandoning of American style of cordon and search operation, the Thai security apparatus would learn, copied, and applied Maoist tactic to fight back (see this article, pg. 7) ; and would mount a complicated espionage network; endorsed a détente with the Chinese Communist Party (CPP), the major sponsor of the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) via Bangkok-Beijing secret diplomatic channel, together with an implementation of royal development projects in rural areas such as soil adjustment in 1981 and later the royal rainmaking (in Thai) in 1999 (see theory here and here) after the Cold War as part of continue economic development project proposed by World Bank in 1959.
Conclusively, the North Vietnam had more casualties than the Americans and the South Vietnam during the Tet Offensive. But the public of North Vietnam could accept more “collateral damage” than the Americans. There is no obvious ratio of acceptable collateral damage, it depends on culture, beliefs, values and public mood. At that time, the public sentiment of anti-war had surged to the peak, hence the U.S. had been enforced to withdraw.
Al Qaeda and ISIS have embraced this kind of “people warfare”, but they have also applied terrorism to attract warriors from the third country, while projecting a fear factor into the developed countries, on one hand to mitigate the “acceptable collateral damage”, and on the other hand to take leverage over psychological advantages. Their main target is the Sunni muslims, and aims to create a unified caliphate over these population. With the death of Osama Bin Laden by Operation Neptune Spear, Al Qaeda has lacked of the charismatic leader like Bin Laden, henceforth ISIS has tried to replace Al Qaeda instead. But, accidentally, with more radical ideology and helps of smart PR campaign on social media, ISIS has helped to mitigate Al Qaeda in practice.
Actually, an objective of both Al Qaeda and ISIS is a nation-building over the Sunni population, but their maneuver hasn’t been acceptable in the international norms under “the liberal, rules-based international order (LRBIO)”. The obsession on the Sykes–Picot Agreement from ISIS is an evidence that they subtly recognize the unfair Westphalian nation-state building and the broader problem on religious differences, and is eager to project their own. (The Sykes-Picot Agreement, exposed to the public in Izvestia and Pravda on November 23, 1917 and in the British Guardian on November 26, 1917, has been viewed by the Arabs as a betrayal from The McMahon–Hussein Correspondence to give birth to Israel of the letter written in November 2, 1917 from “the United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland”, out of the dilemma of British Empire’s Mandatory Palestine.) Had they applied this tactic within 17–18th century, they might be much more acceptable than this era. The indispensable issue, for the revisionist power to survive, is the “readiness” and “maturity” to protect its sovereignty, rather than to purely pursue disastrous strategies. Mao had carefully cultivated his red army long enough before waging a conventional warfare against the Kuomintang (KMT), while Zhou Enlai pursued a significant diplomatic role, albeit sometimes contradicted with Mao’s. Zhou Enlai had also been playing a crucial role on convincing Zhang Xueliang, led to temporary ending of Chinese civil war to fight with Imperial Japan and The Xi’an Incident of 1936. Zhou had informed Zhang to release Chiang Kai Shek later. According to the three worlds theory, Zhou Enlai was a crucial actor of the Bandung conference to propagate the third force, the Non Aligned Movement (NAM) six years after that, to counter against both American and the Soviet’s agenda. Mayaguez incident also helped this position. ASEAN is later somehow influenced by this idea, although at first more on the continuity of the defunct SEATO and its pro-American diplomacy. It is learned that the United Nations at New York put the flag half-mast to honor and mourn Zhou upon his death.
ISIS, in order to replace Al Qaeda, couldn’t wait that long. They have hurried to announce a caliphate state, and waging a conventional warfare against their adversaries and American allies, which is a strategic mistake. Now, time has switched from the Islamic Jihad back to American allies. Different from Soviet-Afghan war, the Soviet army had faced the Sunni Mujahideens supported by American Operation Cyclone (which actually the creation of the Islamic Jihad, Mujahiddin, Al Qaeda and Taliban), the U.S. with applying drone, albeit with being criticized to eradicate the high-value target (HVT) of the terrorist network, and supporting its allies such as Kurds, Iraqi government, Afghanistan government to wage war, in order to maintain low “collateral damage” by design. So American strategy is very obvious, to eradicate ISIS and creating a regional security order in the middle east on one hand (albeit with so broad maneuver and dispute among Gulf countries), and trying to mitigate Taliban and its safe haven in Afghanistan on the other hand. With such low collateral damage, America can wait until the moderate practice will dilute the radical Islamic Jihad.
It doesn’t matter who will be the U.S. president, he will follow this strategy to end the longest war in the U.S. history. Obama had vowed to pull the army out of Afghanistan, but the logic of this reality commanded him to maintain the army in that country, now Trump will face the same reality. Trump, however, is clever enough on not to include nation-building project into the pillar of his latest strategy. (“We are a partner and a friend, but we will not dictate to the Afghan people how to live or how to govern their own complex society. We are not nation building again. We are killing terrorists.”)
Conclusion
According to the CSIS’ “The Afghan War: Reshaping American Strategy and Finding Ways to Win”, Aspen’s Security Forum : The Longest War, and Global Trends in Terrorism 1970 — 2016, the combat against the global terrorism is in the good shape, although it will take time with sound strategy. The U.S. seems to commit to end global terrorist’s haven in Afghanistan, and especially, to prevent the terrorist organizations from obtaining access to weapons of mass destruction as a result of the breakdown of the Non-Proliferation Regime, Nuclear Suppliers Group is one mechanism. It means that Trump has abandoned the Bannon’s ideology and has endorsed a kind of “liberal order” that has been the pillar of American diplomacy since the end of World War II.
This new direction should make Trump to gain better support both from domestic and aboard, if not all. Given that ISIS is a more radical version of Islamic jihad than Al-Qaeda, and both have lost their momentum considering situation in Mosul and Raqqa, a new strategy should produce a better result, albeit a friction and a fog of war remains. According to Harold D. Lasswell’s “Politics: Who Gets what, when, how”, as of a grand strategy to projects power across DIME (diplomacy, information, military and economics), there are equally or more hard work on economic (this is also for Asia’s question) and soft power realm left for Trump to make decisions, although most people in the U.S. have addressed ISIS and cyberattacks are among the top priority threat, while global opinion seems to get worried on ISIS and global climate change.
