hankyoreh

Bruce Cumings

Hankyoreh (Hani): Hillary Clinton is often thought of as ‘hawkish’ and Donald Trump is regarded as ‘dovish’ in their foreign policies. Do you agree with those assessments?

Bruce Cumings (Cumings): Hillary is definitely hawkish, and I worry about the decisions she might take in the Oval Office. She was the main impetus behind toppling Qadhafi, and now Libya is a complete mess. But she continues to say that it was a success.

Donald Trump is not dovish. His standard practice during the campaign is to say outrageous things that get him so much television attention, and provoke denunciations from people that his supporters hate in the first place. The only systematic part of his foreign policy statements is to hark back to interwar isolationism. I wrote about this tendency in American foreign policy a great deal in the second volume of my book, The Origins of the Korean War. It was really only isolationist in regard to Europe, and many so-called Asia-firsters were part of this tendency. But what links this tendency to Trump is his unilateralism, his denunciations of alliances, his anti-immigrant stance, and a general American nationalism. Of course, he switches his positions so frequently that most people have no idea what his foreign policy would look like if he somehow gets into the Oval Office.

Hani: What do you think is the most controversial, or problematic, in Clinton’s foreign policies regarding stablility and peace? Could you answer by referring to her time as Secretary of State?

Cumings: I think the policy of regime change in Libya is the most problematic of her ventures, but she also was a strong advocate of putting American troops into the Syrian Civil War, and that would've been a bigger disaster. It may be that by virtue of being a woman, she wants to push a hard line to show how tough she is. When she was Secretary of State she was conventional in every way, hearkening to the views of the national security establishment, and brought into her staff very predictable inside-the-beltway hacks like Kurt Campbell, who worked on East Asia for her. It's interesting that she did this, because Pres. Obama in recent interviews has indicated that he takes a dim view of the Washington establishment. But I am sure if she gets into the Oval Office that she will bring in people from that same establishment.

Hani: Do you think that her email scandal shows Clinton may have critical weakness in as president in dealing with security?

Cumings: No, this is not even a scandal. It has been blown way out of proportion by Republicans seeking any means to deny her the White House. Colin Powell also used a private email account, and so did many other high officials. People were trying to get used to email in a government computer system that was way out of date (obsolescent), and computers and email systems on the open market were much better. Many, many professional people used their private email to transact business-- like me.

Hani: What do you think is the most controversial, or dangerous, in Trump’s foreign policies?

Cumings: What is most dangerous is what is inside Trump’s head -- where you find basically nothing that would indicate that he knows anything about the rest of the world. He actually said that he knows about Russia because he staged a beauty pageant there. Other presidential candidates would have to quit their campaigns the next morning if they said such ridiculous things. We can't say he has any foreign policies, just provocative statements – like saying South Korea and Japan should have nuclear weapons—that are designed to draw attention to himself. Of course he would not be able to follow through on that if he were president, because the Japanese people would be up in arms and would prevent the government from going nuclear. (South Korea is a different story, since many South Koreans expect to inherit North Korea's nuclear weapons if and when that regime disappears.)

Trump’s political base is made up of people who know very little about the rest of the world, but who feel that countries like Japan, Korea, and China have been stealing their jobs. The vast majority of Americans don't even have a passport, and if they do, it's usually to travel to Mexico or Canada.

Hani: Do agree with the assessment that Trump’s foreign policies is based on isolationalism?

Cumings: I answered that question above, but I will say one more thing: after the immigrant exclusion acts of 1924, a magazine called the National Republic appeared in 1925 and continued until about 1960. Not the National Review, and not the New Republic, to name two very important American political magazines. On its inside cover it had a 10 or 12-point credo, which was nationalistic, racist, anti-immigrant, anti-communist, and in favor of national rather than multinational American businesses-- in other words businesses and industries that produce for the home market, not the world market. You would think that Trump stole many of his views and points from that credo.

Hani: When Trump talks about withdrawing U.S. military commitments to Japan and South Korea, do you think it really means that as president he would preside over a shrinking of the U.S. military abroad?

Cumings: What Trump has done with his life, as he always says, is make deals. If there is any substance to his prattle about withdrawing troops from NATO, Japan, and Korea, it is said in the interest of a provocative opening position in a bargaining situation where he is much more likely to try and get American allies to pay more of the cost of stationing troops in their countries, then he is to withdraw American troops from those same countries.

Hani: What do you think about Trump’s comment that he might allow Korea and Japan to have nuclear weapons, or that he will reset US relations with allies and reconfigure military stationing costs?

Cumings: I answered that question above, but I will also say that not only would Japanese opposition be very strong (the ROK is a different case, as I said, and we need to remember that Park Chung-hee tried to develop nuclear weapons in the 70s), but the US national security establishment and the Pentagon would mount enormous opposition to such a plan. Trump seems to think that the presidency is an office where he can just tell people what to do. But as Harry Truman said about Dwight Eisenhower, who had been in the military his whole career and was used to giving orders to people, “Ike will order people to do this and that, and a few weeks or months later he'll find out that they didn't do it.” State bureaucracies are inertial, and the most inertia of all is gathered up in the Pentagon -- which loves the 900+ bases that it has around the world, 70 years after the end of World War II.

Hani: What do you think about Trump saying that he would talk with Kim Jong-un?

Cumings: That's about the only one of his comments about foreign-policy that I liked. American leaders seem to think that it's a big gift if they deign to talk to enemy heads of state. But diplomacy emerged in history as a way of getting enemies to talk to each other, rather than fight with each other. The one U.S. president to talk to Kim Il Sung over his long life was Jimmy Carter-- and he brought back a freeze on the North's plutonium facilities that lasted for eight years, until George W. Bush quite stupidly destroyed that agreement.

What exactly has Washington gotten from its policy of isolating North Korea for 70 years, and pretending that it doesn't exist? Nothing but conflict, pain and suffering. Give North Korea a couple more years and it will have been around longer than the entire Soviet Union. Franklin Delano Roosevelt opened relations with the USSR in 1933, 16 years after the Bolshevik revolution, and managed to develop a decent relationship with Moscow that allowed them to be allies against the Nazis and Japan in World War II.

I'm sure if Clinton becomes president she will continue the policy of isolation and demanding denuclearization of North Korea. One of the very few things that would make a Trump presidency interesting, is to see what he would do in regard to Korea policy.

Hani: Even though Clinton didn’t say directly, her aides said that they will strengthen sanctions against North Korea until North Korea is on the verge of collapse. Do you think this is effective to make North Korea give up its nuclear program?

Cumings: Well, this has not worked for the past 25 years, so what makes her think it would work for the next four years? This is just another way in which Clinton cannot think outside the box of the national security establishment.

Hani: Could you compare Clinton’s policies toward China to Trump’s?

Cumings: Clinton's policies toward China would be a rerun of her husband's policies, Bush's policies, and Obama's: in other words, pretend to contain China militarily while avoiding serious clashes, and keep the China market open for American business. There is a huge bipartisan business coalition in the United States behind the opening to China ever since Nixon thought it up. They're all making a lot of money, as are the Chinese, and Clinton will never upset that applecart.

If Trump becomes president, he probably will slap heavier tariffs on Chinese exports, but he will also be brought back to the reality that the US-China relationship is the most lucrative and important in the world. (After all, he gets his silk ties and other things made in China.)

Hani: Do you think that Clinton and Trump’s aides are capable of convincing their bosses to change directions when they’re moving in the wrong direction?

Cumings: Hillary Clinton certainly listens carefully to her advisers; the problem is the kind of advisers she surrounds herself with – all tried-and-true Washington Beltway denizens, as well as women trying to act tough like Samantha Power.

Trump cows and intimidates his advisers, as seen by the current flap over his comments about a Mexican-heritage judge. One of his high aides suggested that he soften or reverse this position, and Trump said something like what kind of idiot is this person? One of the most dangerous things about a President Trump is his narcissism, which convinces him that he's always right-- and when he's not, he casually reverses his position so he looks right again.

He would come into office with even less knowledge about the world than Ronald Reagan. But Reagan at least listened to his advisors, and didn't want to do much in foreign-policy anyway-- until Gorbachev came along and presented him with the Soviet Union as a gift on a silver platter. Reagan tended to nod off during national security meetings, or just go to sleep. He believed a lot of bromides that he had accumulated over the decades of his life, but they were mostly harmless.

Trump is very different, he is very active, tons of energy, sleeps only four or five hours a night, hardly listens to anybody. So he would be the most dangerous president probably in American history -- we had some useless and even nutty presidents back in the 19th century, but they did not preside over the largest military force in history.

By Yi Yong-in, Washington correspondent

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