Joshua Walker, who was the global head of strategic initiatives at Eurasia Group and is now president of the Japan Society, spoke about geopolitics and US grand strategy in the G-Zero world at Providence’s Christianity and National Security Conference in November 2019. The following is a transcript of the lecture.
But our next and final afternoon speaker is Joshua Walker, who has been with the strategic initiatives at Eurasia group here in Washington, D.C. He is moving on to New York City to head the Japan Society, an exciting new adventure for him. He is the son of missionaries, he was Baptist. He became sort of Methodist, maybe had an Episcopalian phase, so he is Ecumenical and I’m sure he’s got a great message for us. Thank you.
Joshua Walker: I feel like now I need to defend myself about all of these different denomination things. I still consider myself a Baptist. I have Baptist heritage, I will not give that up so obviously, the politics has changed a lot of things in this country including the way we talk about religion, which is unfortunate. What I want to talk about is really the idea of grand strategy, and I’m going to use my own personal background
When we talk about grand strategy, oftentimes we put it in a very august setting and it’s hard to say anything without acknowledging these very formidable military leaders behind me, right? This is the people who do grand strategy, not some geek dude like me or any of the folks in this room. But I actually think that now in the era we’re living in, grand strategy has never been more applicable to each of you, than it was to these individuals. You’ve got the most powerful weapon in the world sitting right in front of you. You’re trying to avoid looking at it right now.
That iPhone, that smartphone that you have connects you to the entire world. And I’m going to use my own personal narrative as someone who grew up in Japan with Southern Baptist Missionaries who’ve been there for over 40 years and spent most of my professional life working on the Republic of Turkey, which just celebrate its 96th birthday a couple days ago on the same day that the U.S. Congress passed the Armenian Genocide resolution finally declaring that what happened in 1950 was a genocide. And to think about the worlds colliding in such a different way.
So, by a brief biographical sketch, if you read the most recent edition of Providence, you’ll see an article in there that lays out my experience in Turkey, so I don’t feel like I need to actually get into it. I’ll just do a quick commercial about that in the journal that Mark’s already talked about, probably extensively, today.
But the bottom line is, I felt in many ways that when I left Japan, I was never going to look back. Because Japan in many ways, as you know, was this formidable player that before World War II was kind of the guardian of Asia. It was guided in some ways, that generation’s China that was in the 1980s, very much like China is today. The difference is of course in 1980 when Japan was considered to be number one, they were buying up all of Rockefeller Center and all these areas in America, we still had American military forces there. So no matter how heated the economic debates became, whether about cars or beef or whatever else, we had the upper hand as Americans because we had military forces. They didn’t have military forces.
The debate now has dramatically changed, right? Japan has no illusions about being number one and they after the disaster, the triple disasters, it’s called on March 11, 2011, which really was a turning point for me and my life as well because I lost contact with my parents that day. They were in the affected regions, cell phones are just not working, and it happened to be a couple days before my birthday, and not being able to get a hold of your parents kind of shakes you. Sorry for the pun there, but it really shakes you to the core to find out that your parents, who are supposed to be living in one of the most stable democratic countries, you can’t reach them. And it made me evaluate what my own calling and life was, my own passion.
What I realized was it wasn’t necessarily any individual country or people. My parents feel very particularly called to Japan and came to serve there for 40 years. With as little success as they have numerically in Japan, if they had a choice of going to Japan or Korea, I joke that they always made the wrong choice. 50% of South Korea is Christian, about 1% of Japan is Christian. And Japan is one of the most advanced societies in the world where you’re born Buddhist, you’re married Christian, and you die Shinto because that’s kind of fluidity of religion to them. It’s more about formulaic and expressions to them and it’s kind of all roads lead to the same place, which is a very different viewpoint than particularly evangelicals who would take on the world.
And so for me that disaster allowed me to come back and really see Japan through a new lens. But I spent most of my professional career working on a country that most of us equate with Thanksgiving. Because when you say I’m a Turkey expert, your first question is you know, how to carve all the… and there’s all sorts of funny jokes about that. But there’s not really a country that’s as consequential in many ways to the debate currently even in Washington. Now, we’re not really talking about a foreign policy in Washington because we have the Nats in the World Series. I go to the other side and you have an impeachment trial. And so, you know, foreign policy’s just not in our purview right now. It’s just not the main focus of what’s going on in Washington.
But as you know if you live in Washington, or you come through Washington, everybody else in the world knows what we’re doing. Everybody has a strategic relationship with the United States, right? Every country that as an embassy right here along Embassy Row will talk about the U.S. as one of its strategic allies. And we use that term a lot, we have a strategic relationship with Turkey, a strategic relationship with Japan. But really we’re not being very sincere. I think the U.S. cares a lot more about our own internal interests and we’re more tactical. We’re not strategic in our thinking.
And I think t’s only gotten worse in the last decade because of American domestic politics. What my current boss, Dan Burger, talks a lot about is this concept of a G0 world. You know, you kind of have to play around with words. You have the G7 and the G20. Really, you know, none of those institutions which we have seen very vividly in the last couple years have really been able to keep the system that we think of from making major disasters, right? It didn’t stop the economic crisis back in 2008, it certainly didn’t stop the Syrian crisis that’s ongoing. It didn’t stop the Arab Spring. It really, in some ways, is just an opportunity for those that have to come and talk about those that have not, and not really empower either side.
And I think anyways as Christians, we fall right in between this, right? There are many of us that are privileged to work in this space where people keep faith, and many of whom are represented in this room. But oftentimes we find ourselves at a loss, because our Christian tradition and our social justice side of things, compels us to care for the least of these, but those of us that are more hard-headed on the realist side are like okay, how do we deal with this? And that’s where the Christian realism tradition comes out and what you’ve heard about today.
But I think grand strategy oftentimes is only equated with one side of that equation. It’s kind of like well, if you’re a bleeding-heart liberal and you care about these poor orphans and refugees, you can’t possibly know anything about grand strategy. And I would argue that actually, the same way that my own life and my own work at the State Department and other places has let me, I don’t think that diplomacy anymore is being done just by people in pinstripe suits at the State Department. It’s done by each of you when you travel around the world.
When you say I’m a Christian or I’m an American, you’ve just branded yourself. You’ve just unofficially become an ambassador, because everything you do is a reflection of those communities from which you come and the hats which you wear. I think that in the world where it’s increasingly leaderless, where this is not a statement directly about what’s happening in this town. I think in general I can say that we’re lacking leadership. Full stop. In our churches, in our communities, in our nations, we’re lacking leadership.
Now you can blame one individual and say well it’s all Trump’s fault and the populist movement that led to his election, you can blame the Brits for Brexit, you can complain to a lot of different people. But really this is about a symptom versus a cause, right? My particular political persuasions will not surprise you having worked for Secretary Clinton, so you know that I was not a big fan of the current President, but he’s our President, right? I want him to be successful. I believe in America’s place in the world and so, unlike some of my other friends who are spending a lot of their time doing other things, I believe that American grand strategy needs to figure out how to maximize our abilities, our resources, to a maximum end, right?
And I think that one of the challenges that we have when I think about the two countries that I love dearly, and a lot of my professional and personal career in both growing up in Japan from 1 to 18, and then working in Turkey as a Fullbright Scholar, as an embassy official, as a State Department official, and as a scholar and a researcher for over two decades now, I see a tale of two countries, right? If you think about Turkey and in 2002, when I first went to Turkey, who had a new shiny government that came to power led by then mayor of Istanbul Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who basically used his religious beliefs as a devout Sunni to make the case that Turkey needed to unshackle itself from it’s Halal legacy to the secular past that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, had found, and that it’s time that the hidden middle class step up.
In may ways, you could argue that the Anatolian Tigers, so-called in places like Kayseri and many other places in the Anatolian heartland, um, in some ways followed under Calvinist tradition, right? They wore their religion on their sleeves. They use it to kind of show that they were not corrupt. The word “white” in Turkish, “ak” is the same as the party in power: Ak Party. So it was basically an implicit criticism of the corruption of the old Turkish system. They swept the power and because of some technicalities they one close to 40% of the vote, but they got close to 70% of the Church Parliament.
And in a system that has over 20 parties, one party with that high of a number immediately rules, and so they’ve been in power since then. They haven’t let go of power. In fact, if anything, that power has been morphed into one individual, and that mayor that had that bright future, who led Turkey towards the EU promise of the EU membership, and also his ability to kind of look at his surrounding environment and find strategic environments for Turkey to play a decisive role has only been honed.
But instead of being honed by the West and by its tutelage and by European Tutelage or its relationship with America, increasingly it’s looking more and more to the various authoritarian regimes of the region. Particularly Mr. Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China, which is a very dangerous trend in many different ways.
If I look at this from a purely geographic scope, Turkey has always from the Ottoman times to current, occupied a very unique place, right? When you think about where West and East meet and all the cliches you can think of with Turkey, it’s been part of every major world event. In some sense, this is where the Gordian knot quite literally is, this is where Noah’s ark is rumored to actually be, this is where the Roman empire met its untimely end with the Byzantine empire when the Muslims swept out from Saudi Arabia.
It was not the Arabs. Others who really made Islam and the Islamic theocracy into a worldwide empire. It was the Turks. And the struggle in the Middle East has never really been about the Arabs and Jews. It’s really been between Persians and the Turks. And right now you see that playing out in spades with Turkey’s role in the world, with Iran’s role in the world.
Turkey has always been a reliable US and NATO ally is now in danger of no longer being anchored by the West, which you know, my Turkish friends would be very angry at me for saying that, but it’s a statement of reality. When you have an American administration that has a warm personal relation, president to president, but our societies and our governments have never been as far apart up to the point that we’re now about to sanction them and we’re also thinking about ways of diminishing their role despite the fact that they’re the second largest military and maybe the only Muslim-majority nation that plays such a unique and important role.
Particularly in my own life, when I think about the post-9/11 environment, a lot of our policy in Turkey was to do good things in such a way that we could not be accused of perpetuating a global war on Islam. By having Turkey with us in Afghanistan, by having Turkey with us in what was coming after the Iraq war, America was trying to have a grand strategy that ultimately did not end well for us. We still have so-called “endless wars” that are ongoing.
I think about the spectacular way Turkey has changed and dramatically reoriented itself, not necessarily because Turkey made a choice, but because the environment in which it found itself changed. The Syrian Civil War is a great example. There is no country and no leader more anti-Assad or Syria than Turkey.
My former professor and mentor, Ahmet Davutoğlu, a former Foreign Minister and then Prime Minister of Turkey, had a term. He used the term “jewel” to describe Syria, saying Syria is the jewel of Turkish foreign policy. When I was there, Turkey was bringing Syria out of the cold and creating robust linkages between southern Turkey and northern Syria, to the point that it was visa-free travel. My friends from Gaziantep could easily jump in a car and drive to Damascus. They could visit Aleppo and areas that used to be great cities of civilization, now reduced to rubble.
When Assad began his murderous campaign against his own people and the uprising reached its climax, while we were debating red lines and resolutions, the Turks were taking action. The actions the Turks were taking were very self-guided and self-directed. They had been consistent over the last five years, telegraphing what they were about to do in northern Syria for a very long time. There have been no questions about what the Turks believe the YPG represents. There is no question what they believe the Kurdish allies of CENTCOM represent. They call them exactly what they are: terrorists. Turkey has also had a very clear view on what that means.
Turks will tell you this is not a war against Kurds. It’s hard to believe that given some of the actions of the last couple of weeks, and America now has blood on its hands. This is not the first time we sold out the Kurds, nor will it be the last time. It breaks my heart given that I have many friends in the region. The problem is we all share a similar destiny when I think about the future of the region. When I think about the Ottoman Empire and what kept it together so well, it was not a very strong imperial force at the top. It was that they allowed regional rule to take place.
What I’ve seen in the last couple of years has been particularly problematic because, even among Kurdish fighters, there’s not a sense of union. The Kurds of northern Iraq, the Kurds of Iran, the Kurds of Turkey, the Kurds of Syria—there is no one unifying force that speaks on their behalf. When you have the complete about-face and a U.S. President that does not prevent Turkish forces from entering, we knew what was going to happen.
Everybody in the security establishment knew what was coming. You have what we’ve seen in the last couple of weeks, and now you see a case where the Kurds have flipped from being U.S. allies to working with the Russians because they’re realistic. They have to deal with an enemy. If we’re not going to put our troops in harm’s way, it’s not that a couple hundred Special Forces are going to stop the advance of Turkish forces, but it’s a signal. The Turks would not cross it. They understand the force of the U.S. military. But when President Trump signaled to President Erdoğan that he was okay and could take care of his business, it was a real disaster that unfolded.
The thing that is particularly problematic is that this was a long-term strategy failure. They said, “We’re going to lose the Kurds and get closer to the Turks.” This might have worked because Turkey has a large military. It’s worth selling out a friend for the greater good. But instead, it was a goal. You play soccer, turn around, and kick it to your own goal. That’s what I’d call it—pretty disastrous.
Now we’re trying to pick up the pieces. The irony is that as Turkey, as a country and as a civilization, has gone through a very dark period beginning with the coup attempt a couple of years ago and its estrangement with the U.S., there is positive development. The new mayor of Istanbul—no one would have expected that. In a country that has been problematic from an authoritarian point of view for a while, you have a new mayor representing a different political persuasion and type of party. It seems he will probably challenge Erdoğan at some point. If the trends continue, he has a pretty good chance, given that the Turkish economy is in a difficult spot.
At the same time, Turkey has gone through a monumental re-shifting of its international priorities from going Western and focusing on the West, which is more or less falling apart. When you think about European institutions, populism at home and in Europe, we’re weaker than we’ve ever been. We’re more internally focused than we’ve ever been, and it’s very hard to trust the United States, not just because of what happened to the Kurds, but because of all the things we’ve been doing.
Whatever your political view may be about the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership, the Transatlantic Trade Zone, or climate affairs and the climate accord, even if you personally don’t believe in those things, there is now a question mark when it comes to U.S. leadership in the world. While we may have military power and hard power, Professor Nye at Harvard talks about the soft power of the U.S.
The attractiveness of the U.S. is on the decline. While we have amazing institutions and educational facilities, we have Hollywood, which produces movies people watch, and we have pop culture that continues to give us such gems as Kim Kardashian. American culture and civilization increasingly resemble the decadence of Rome rather than its rise. It concerns me because I am one of these Americans who believes America’s place in the world is to be a model, particularly a city on a hill, as Reagan and many other presidents before him described it.
The one bright spot I will focus on is Japan. Japan doesn’t have illusions of being number one, but it does have a role to play as the third largest economy in the world. It went through its own disasters in 2011, but as a result, the political experiment of the new political party was thrown out, and the old guard and ruling party came back with a vengeance. A former Prime Minister who had failed miserably one time before came back and is now about to become the longest-serving Prime Minister in Japanese history.
One of his keys to success has been that Abe seems to have learned from his past mistakes. Many of his associates talk about the idea that Prime Minister Abe never forgets what it was like to fail so abjectly and to understand what humility truly looks like. In many ways, Japanese grand strategy, if I can use that term, is to go beyond their region. They have a problematic history with their own neighborhood because of the imperial history of World War II and the lead-up to what they call the Pacific War that led to Pearl Harbor and the history we know. There are deep-seated feelings between Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese that cannot be erased. These scars remain.
Everyone points to the German example. The Germans did it; can’t you just get past it? Tell that to any Holocaust survivor. Tell that to any Jew watching the Neo-Nazi movement rise in different parts of Europe. While Germany did a much better job than Japan, one of the reasons Japan left the system the way it was is because of us. We occupied Japan for almost a decade under McArthur. The way we structured the international order in a post-World War II environment in Asia is very much American grand strategy. Whether it’s the Marshall Plan in Europe or the hub-and-spoke model in Asia, Japan has been a critical player in that space. Its own constitution precludes it from having a military force, yet it is probably the seventh largest and most sophisticated fighting force in the world. It’s not called the military; it’s euphemistically called the self-defense force.
The distinction between offensive and defensive weapons is strange. This gun is a defensive weapon that I can shoot and kill somebody with—semantics. What Japan has done is, within what I call strategic ambiguity, found a place for itself. Hosting American military forces that would be on the front lines or the tip of the spear, whatever happens in the Korean peninsula contingency, Taiwan, mainland China, Hong Kong, or any flashpoint, they’re all coming from Japan. The burden-sharing agreement, which Japan has willingly paid more of, will spark a bigger debate next year.
Prime Minister Abe seems to understand Trump better than any other world leader. He flatters him to his face, and disagreements are painted over. There’s no overt or direct attack on President Trump. There’s an understanding of the need to work directly with him mano a mano, while the bureaucracies will do different things. This has been difficult in the national security establishment with the rotating cabinet secretaries and the number of national security advisors under this administration.
From the Japanese point of view, they want to stay the course and ensure no one questions their commitments to the U.S.-Japan alliance. Sometimes, they are even more in favor of it. With the new Imperial Era upon us, and the enthronement a couple of weeks ago, despite the typhoon, there’s a feeling that under the Reiwa Era, meaning beautiful harmony, Japan will play a larger role. Not necessarily in East Asia, but in the Indo-Pacific. This term euphemistically combines all parts of the world that are not Western. Everything from the Indian subcontinent to Hawaii, Guam, and everything in between is now considered the Indo-Pacific.
It’s hard to call that grand strategy because the terminology differs. When a Japanese person says Indo-Pacific, they mean Africa too. The speech laying out the Indo-Pacific strategy was first delivered by Prime Minister Abe in Nairobi, Kenya, about five years ago during the development conference. He said these areas need to be linked, offering a not-so-subtle alternative to the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative.
Now the U.S. government has adopted the Indo-Pacific strategy. PACOM, formerly Pacific Command, is now Indo-Pacific Command. This clearly shows from a strategic point of view that we are moving in that direction. As a scholar and student of history, it is telling. The part of the world I focused on has been called everything from the Near East to the Middle East and now Southwest Asia. These terms show perspective. Near East is near to who? East compared to the British Empire, which defined the term. Middle East was in relation to U.S. power positioning. Southwest Asia is relevant to East Asia, as the center of gravity moves to Asia.
My friend Kura Khan wrote *The Future is Asian.* America has the ability to be European, Transatlantic, and Asian simultaneously. This is a major advantage, and for those below a certain age, this is where the future lies. If you’re asking what languages to learn in schools, it will increasingly be Chinese or other Asian languages. Whether it’s the fastest-growing population in India or the most lucrative populations, this is where the center of gravity is shifting.
It’s not as much French or German anymore. Most people are not going to Paris or Berlin, even though they’re fabulous cities. You go there to enjoy food, art, and culture like in Rome. But nobody goes to Rome anymore to learn about grand strategy. We’re learning history. When it comes to the Roman Empire, it doesn’t have relevance today.
I think directly looking at the future of U.S. foreign policy towards China is the direction all of us will struggle with moving forward. History is yet to be written from the other point of view, but I increasingly think that history will not be written by what one individual President does here in Washington but by what the mayors and governors of states and increasingly private sector businesses do.
I would argue that Mark Zuckerberg has more influence in terms of the global empire than sometimes the President of the United States, with the ability he has to shape preferences and guidance and get inside your mind with the phone in front of you and the little red dots that pop up to notify you. Studies show your mood is affected by these things.
If that’s not a grand strategic challenge, I don’t know what is. Companies shape preferences and likes in a very successful PR and commercial sense. It makes me wonder how the U.S. government will compete with that because when you look at Senators questioning tech startup leaders, it’s clear there’s a generational gap and lack of understanding. Watching the Twitter account of the late John McCain was humorous because you know McCain didn’t actually use it himself. He didn’t even use email, yet there are pithy memes that don’t fit.
President Trump, none of us question whether he uses that phone. I was living in Asia during that time in diplomacy. With some leaders, there’s a word in Japanese, “tatemae,” meaning the facade or screen, and “honne,” meaning the true self.
The divide between these two worlds has become more extreme on social media. This will play out diplomatically as well. Diplomats have always had to deliver tough messages or represent their country’s best interests while sometimes not being entirely truthful. Increasingly, we all must do that, whether representing your country, faith, family, or creed. In a world where each of us competes for individual brand space, what does that mean when you’re bringing online a billion people at a time who want the American dream and lifestyle?
This is something Americans don’t think about much. It’s telling that a couple of blocks from the most powerful house in the world, you’ll find homeless people sheltered there. International friends point this out to me, but it doesn’t strike many of us as strange. We’ve become cynical and jaded.
I’ll conclude by considering what U.S. grand strategy could look like in the next century. Making decisions about the next five years is hard. If you’re an officer in the Pentagon trying to figure out who our biggest adversary will be in 2030 and what weapon systems will be needed in a world where nobody is on the battlefield but gamers flying drones from home, what implications does that have for our morality?
How can a Book written 2,000 years ago and a Savior we think about euphemistically have operational control over this? That’s where I see the role of a magazine like Providence. I see each of you as people of faith thinking about national security instead of running from it and saying, “Leave unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.” I think we should run toward that space with moral conviction. Before criticizing the Turks for what they have done, consider the log in our own eye.
This is on full display in this town—the partisanship, lack of grand strategy, and problems we suppress. You must identify key phrases early. If you can’t even call your enemy your enemy, or your adversary your challenger, it’s difficult.
In the case of China, we’re not angry at Chinese people. We respect Chinese culture and civilization, but the PLA and the Communist Party running China today, continuing its regime in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and other places, must be called out for what they are. If we euphemistically divide the economic and security spheres, saying we’re adversaries in one but can have a win-win in the other, that plays into debates like 5G, AI, and supercomputing—battlegrounds of the future. Allowing a so-called “commercial entity” directly tied to the Chinese state to operate unchallenged means we’re not playing on the same field.
A country like Japan is ahead of the curve. Asians don’t tend to fight directly. That’s not the style of Japanese fighting. There’s a reason they’re called ninjas. They kill you in your sleep—you won’t see it coming. In Middle East politics or fighting, you walk up to someone, tell them you hate them, punch them in the face, and then have a beer afterward. Since they’re Muslims, they’re not supposed to drink, but we don’t tell anyone.
In Asian culture, generally, you never say anything direct. You never say anything insulting to anyone’s face. But when they’re not looking, you stab them in the back. In some ways, that’s exactly what we’re confronting. Americans tend to think of ourselves as straight shooters. We call it like we see it. The problem is, sometimes that has direct ramifications.
In the case of North Korea, in the Peninsular context, putting on this charade of a conversation only delays the inevitable: we clearly don’t have the same view on things. Either North Korea becomes a new type of regime that is acknowledged and has its own place in the world as a realist power, or change will have to happen, likely driven mostly by Beijing.
When I see Russia today, there’s no love lost between the Russians and Chinese. The biggest threat most Russians feel is from China. There are only 3 million Russians living in Siberia and well over 100 million Chinese right along their border. They would love to walk across and take that part over. Yet U.S. foreign policy has done an amazing job of bringing these two powers together.
In the foreign policy space, the two greatest winners of the last decade have been China and Russia. Whether it’s the war in Iraq, the Iran competition, or North Korea, we seem to be on the wrong side of history in all these areas. I’m not just talking about the wrong side of history from a moral point but from an actual strategic point. We are light-years behind where we were at the beginning of the Cold War when the fathers of grand strategy and foreign policy thinking, like George Kennan, walked these streets.
I’ll return to where I began: the lack of leadership. It’s my hope that a new generation in this room and beyond can meet this challenge. I’m obviously a little pessimistic at the moment, but I’m an optimist at heart. Thankfully, I’ve got 10 years to spare. My prediction is the U.S. will go through a moment of internal reflection, much like after Watergate and the Vietnam War, which shook our fundamental faith in ourselves.
That’s not a prediction about what impeachment means, but no matter which political party wins the next election, it will be more about domestic politics, and we’ll increasingly lose our face and ability to shape the world outside.
Ten years from now, we have an amazing opportunity. I am an optimist. I never think we should bet against the United States of America, both in terms of raw talent and resources. You can’t pick a continent between the Atlantic and Pacific, with neighbors like Canada and Mexico, and be the superpower we have been without acknowledging how blessed we are with the sense of providence we have.
Thank you very much. I think we have five minutes or so to stay on track. I’m happy to take questions if anyone has them. If you can introduce yourself, that will also help me.
Q&A
Question: Gordon Middleton, Patrick Henry College. Certainly some reports coming out of Turkey about the amazing move of God’s presence and spirit there in Muslims coming to faith. At the same time, as you described, the government tends to be on a trajectory going toward a harder Islamic law. Can you confirm either of those, perhaps the first or the second, however you want to address that? And perhaps going from grand strategy to cosmic strategy, how do you see those two vectors interacting, and what does that potentially look like for the future?
Answer: The first thing I have to say is I had a dear friend who went to Patrick Henry who played on your basketball team many moons ago when I played basketball and we went to Brazil together. He was the best player we ever had and we’d never heard of Patrick Henry College until then so I have a lot of respect for you guys.
Response: So Patrick Henry College is known for its basketball players?
Answer: Clearly, right? It’s just where I was at. It’s really not that good as far as playing goes. The first part: I think I addressed it a little bit in the article that I write about. If you’re looking for numeric indicators, Turkey is not a very optimistic place in the world, right? It’s literally illegal to be a missionary. The term “missionary” means to convert somebody with the sword that came to them in the Crusades. So when I described what my parents do, which is kind of awkward, right? What do your parents do? Oh yeah, they’re murderers who use a sword to convert people. That’s not what I wanted. So I said my dad is a pastor and my mom is a first grade English teach, because at the time that was functionally what they do. Lot of respect for them, they’re people of the Book, great, wonderful.
Istanbul’s one of these amazing places where you can go to Asia and Europe in a couple minutes. And also, you can throw a stone between a mosque, a synagogue, and a Church, whatever type of Church you want to find. The problem is, as we saw at the end of the Brunson, the… Pastor Brunson the… whatever term you want to use… hostage, faith opponent, whatever… And he’s coming out with a book and it will be interesting to read his experience. But clearly, there’s a suspicion, to put it lightly, of the people of faith in Turkey whose entire mission is focused on converting people.
My approach on this, and I had a privilege working from the U.S. embassy office. At times I would come across Christian workers there who were there on non-missionary visas but were doing missionary work. Which from my perspective as a Christian, we’re all called to be missionaries, right? Just because the Southern Baptist Commission pays my parents’ salary, doesn’t mean that we get a pass, right? Just because I give to the Lottie Moon doesn’t mean that I can be like well I don’t need to tell anybody about Christ’s love, right? We’re all called to do that. We have a pretty lazy and very American way of doing things.
So I got pretty heated with some of my colleagues who were over there who would say they’re working an “import export” business and did no business because, I’m like, you just look foolish. You’re a horrible businessman, so if you’re going to use the title of businessman, do it well. I think the Mormon Church is a great example. They do it for the laity. There’s no Mormon who’s over there as a mission. They are there doing work teaching English. They actually are running businesses, doing all of these things.
So if you’re going to convert Christians, and I think the point you’re referencing there is God can move in miraculous ways, and actually the tougher and more difficult it is, the better, all right? I think about my experience with Palestinians, right? There’s no people in the world that have suffered more than the Palestinians. Whatever that political statement may be. But you think about the heart of Christianity, it’s some of our most historic sites, whether it’s in Bethlehem or in others. When people think about Jesus as a Christian, most people think about Him looking like most of the people in this room. I guarantee Jesus was not this light-skinned, right? He lived in a part of the world that they resembled much more the people of Israel today and Palestinians.
And I think the challenge has been that oftentimes in our own American, Christian understanding of things, we believe you have to do things our way. This American exceptionalism is not just for foreign policy. It’s in our Christian faith too. And when I think about the Global South and the rise of Christianity, increasingly we’re not in the driver’s seat of foreign policy or even Christian doctrine these days. We’ve seen very clearly the Methodist Church, right?
I think it’s very interesting to watch how Christianity is working in Turkey because literally if you go to Cappadocia, this is where St. Paul… Antioch, the very first Church in the world was in Turkey, right? In Antioch, which is right close to where a million refugees from Syria huddled around these caves where St. Peter started his first Church and the Catholic Church grew.
And you go from that period of time to today, where I think, numerically, there’s only 7,000 Christians who go ahead and name… In Turkey, you have to put your religious Creed because that’s a legacy of the Ottoman period. There are a lot of people who have some Muslim on their card that are very much like people here who are calling themselves Christians but don’t particularly have a community of faith. But don’t particularly have any real persuasion but they like to Celebrate Christmas and Easter but don’t have a personal faith.
And so in many ways I find it much easier to work in a place like Turkey where it’s so dry and so… so clear-cut. You know, I prayed before most of my meals and I would invite my Muslim friends to do that with me. They thought it was the greatest thing ever. This is amazing. We have a prayer that we say but it’s kind of formulaic and we just kind of chant. We don’t actually have a meaning behind it. You actually think about what you’re saying and you bless this food and talk about the people that are around there and you’re able to actually have a personal relationship with your God? That’s awesome! That’s appealing. But increasingly, it’s harder and harder to get people that have that cross-cultural and cultural ability.
And it kind of hurts me a little bit to say this, but I just feel that the Americans I see increasingly of faith, and the idea that they have going over there is to basically take a Bible to the middle of the streets and start thumping people upside the head with it without realizing that you’re really making it difficult for the indigenous Christian population. You’re actually hurting them if you come all the way from Texas – I’m not picking on Texas, I love Texas – they would come over here and they would go to the street corner, and they almost wanted to get arrested because it was a great story to tell back home. “I was in the country where Paul got arrested and I got arrested too.”
That may be great for you and for the embassy official who had to get your sorry bottom out of jail. It’s annoying to me. But what does it do to the other Christians? Because then they’re like oh yeah, you need outside support. Oh yeah, that Andrew Brunson, he’s working for CIA but he’s related to the coup. So I don’t blame Andrew Brunson or his family for their work. He has a passionate heart for the Turkish people. Even now, despite everything that’s happened to him, he preaches forgiveness. Right?
And when you look at the defining moment in U.S.-Turkey relations for the last three years under this President, President Trump, the Brunson Affair is kind of the top one. And so I think there is a role and a special place that we all have to play but we need to play it from a sense of humility and a sense of understanding the region. I probably lost track of the second part of your question. What was it… Okay great. Maybe time for one more question?
Question: Chung Won-Li from South Korea. So I’ve got a question about you personally. So I guess IR liberals and many who are in South Korea would be worried about what they view as almost like a fulfilling outcome of hawks. U.S. hawks reached a broader strategy on China but they fear that what could be avoided actually becomes a reality. More U.S. government hawkish by China, and China bounces back while equally hawkish and the countries in the middle can transpire. So, in your view, do you believe that U.S.-China’s Second Cold War is inevitable, or is something that, with reasonable prudence and cooler heads, can be prevented?
Answer: So two things. Unfortunately, we’re already intent on Cold War. Right? We can’t avoid that. China’s already made it very clear that the great Chinese firewall will prevent anyone from entering and we have to to make choices. The 5G is a great example, right? The recent action of the Administration against Huawei is a very clear indication that anything that you do or say on any Chinese network is no longer over, right? It is clearly being controlled and used. Now, we can make the case that Apple also has this treasure trove, but really this is not a competition between Washington and Beijing. This is a competition between Beijing and Silicon Valley, alright? I would argue that GAFA – Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon – have a lot more in that struggle than anybody else watching it has, and we’re just trying to play catch-up.
Having said that, we’re not quite at the Cold War yet, right? And it’s very different, right? Because the Soviet Union was economically cut off from the rest of the world, and the “free world” as we called it, the leader of the free world was back here in Washington and really was able to mobilize people.
So our grand strategy, my professor at Yale John Gettis, talks about empire by invitation or empire by force. The Soviet Union was the route by force. And you literally forced everyone behind an iron curtain to be part of their side, whereas Americans generally were invited in. Now sometimes we invited ourselves, we stayed a little longer than we should have, but more or less… If you have to make a choice in the world between who you were going to go with, the Americans were the most benign influence.
My fear of what’s happening now goes back to my point about leadership. We’re lacking leadership everywhere. Right? I don’t actually think Xi Jinping is a particularly strong leader. Right? That’s a controversial statement, but I don’t think he is. I don’t think a strong or visionary leader like Mao would have let the province in Hong Kong persist the way they are. I don’t think the Uyghur problem would get to where it is.
Yes, I don’t believe there’s been some sort of flowering and opening for these things to happen, but they were pretty mismanaged, right? And what’s amazing to me is instead of being able to take that to our advantage, we actually bungled even worse, right? What I mean by that is we are driving ourselves into a world in which we are exactly what you said, in which we are self-possessing strategy.
And you said you’re from South Korea. Let me just point this out. There is no bigger strategic threat to U.S.-China then what’s happening right now between South Korea and Japan. These are our two closest allies in the region and what’s happening? They’re going at a Cold War at each other. You as a South Korean going to Japan will be accused of different things, right? Japanese buying South Korean products will be accused of not being loyal. That’s absurd.
We have more military forces – the army on the Korean peninsula, the air force and navy on Japanese Islands, than anywhere else in the world. And yet we’re allowing this to go back and forth. Now, you could say well that’s not our problem. That may be true. But these are two key allies that now don’t have an intelligence-sharing community anymore.
So I don’t particularly have a fond view of President Putin right now, obviously. But I also don’t have a fond view of the Japanese began by putting in moral whiteness. There were mistakes made on both sides. And the thing that’s most egregious to me, because I’m not Japanese and I’m not South Korean, is the lack of U.S. leadership. And that lack of leadership is present everywhere that we’ve seen. Right? And to me, the South Korea-Japan situation is far worse.
Now, I can make the case that South Korea is no longer a U.S. ally because it’s already in China’s orbit, right? I mean, think about the level of integration between the Chinese economy and South Korea, and you think about these different things going on. I could basically look out 20 years and see a scenario in which South Korea would much rather get along with its more powerful neighbor to the North and its neighbor to the North immediately, the North Koreans, than have some type of peace settlement. Because if a peace settlement is going to be a preemptive strike, a bloody nose, so to speak, to South Korea, that’s probably not South Korea’s interest because of the lives that we’ve lost.
But I still believe, maybe naively, that the U.S. power in this region is not necessarily by forcing people to do things, but by providing good offices and opportunities to drive in that direction. When I think about South Korea’s economy and how interlinked it is to the Japanese, and I think of the people in this town who are making lots of different decisions about how to deal with the fallout from the pushback against China and the supply chain, the last thing we need right now are the two most powerful allies we have there, and the two biggest economies going at it like children. So, that might be a little harsh but it’s kind of what I feel right now.
