Why a divided Congress is better for foreign policy

OPINION:

Thanks to the rural-urban divide, Democrats controlling the House and Republicans the Senate may be the new normal, but that will empower, not frustrate, presidents charged with keeping America prosperous and safe.

U.S. efforts since Richard Nixon’s trip to China and the collapse of the Berlin Wall to bring China and Russia into the post-World War II Western system of shared prosperity and mutual security have absolutely failed.

Vast oil deposits have emboldened Moscow to modernize its military, undertake mischief in the Middle East and repeatedly violate Western sovereignty — specifically, invade the Ukraine, assassinate opponents in United Kingdom and undermine free elections in Europe and America.

Admitting China to the World Trade Organization (WTO) has spawned a kleptocapitalist powerhouse bent on perfecting artificial intelligence to achieve military and economic supremacy and control its population. Facial recognition, other monitoring technologies and carrots and sticks will ultimately render its citizens less free than smart robots if the latter achieve reasoning processes rivaling humans and quicker reaction speeds.

Now China is propagating its brand of state-orchestrated capitalism and Orwellian social control to developing country governments, through a grand Belt and Road initiative that lures poorer nations into debt servitude.

Beijing challenges an overstretched American military with an aggressive naval buildup, militarization of islands in the international waters of the South China Sea and projects power into the Indian Ocean and soon the Persian Gulf.

Japan and Europe are stuck in decades-long malaise — neither can find a way to grow or keep up with Chinese and American dynamism.

The German-French axis believes it can hold dysfunctional EU economic and political institutions together, perpetuate harmful immigration and internal migration policies, and suppress rising nationalism by punishing Britain for existing and Italy for seeking alternative paths within the union.

Worse, Europeans clearly have no intention of adequately financing their own defense. Its most powerful actor, Germany, refuses to fight when threatened. Berlin is happy to finance the Russian military and covert operations by upping its purchases of Russian natural gas and to soft peddle the threat China poses to profit from exports of machinery and technology to the Middle Kingdom.

All this requires hardened American positions on international commerce, diplomacy and defense, and Congress is hardly helpful.

Globalists in both political parties — supported by Wall Street’s pecuniary instincts and campaign contributions — counsel cutting economic deals and regional cooperation on security matters in hopes of appeasing Beijing. They demand that ever-larger portions of the national budget be diverted to vote-buying entitlements schemes — at the expense of federal support for defense and advanced civilian technologies, and an indiscriminant open door to legal and illegal immigration.

Isolationists in both parties would have us throw up a permanent tariff wall and prioritize assembly jobs over artificial intelligence. They pretend that with just one-sixth the global economy the Amazons and Googles can maintain the technological leadership now central to warfighting and peacetime defenses against Russian and Chinese cyber-attacks on our political, cultural and commercial institutions.

Truth is American innovators need access to global markets, but China and Russia must be excluded from Western global economic institutions like the WTO. That is the global analog to saying extortionists, embezzlers and fraudsters should not prowl freely in domestic commerce.

Presidential candidates campaign on solutions that pander to globalist and isolationist tropisms, because the average voter — bombarded by media obsessed with painting one or the other political party as evil or dumb — hasn’t the spare energy to sort all this or react to anything other than promises of free health care or a border wall.

Once isolated in the Oval Office, presidents must craft policies to confront foreign commercial predation and finance the military. I doubt on either score, Hillary Clinton or Mitt Romney would not have taken Mr. Trump’s tough line on China — a radical course correction from Bush-Obama appeasement.

A divided Congress poses much less of an obstacle to presidential leadership that establishes policies founded on facts that transcend electoral pandering — even if one of the two chambers is obsessed with unearthing his past peccadilloes through investigatory abuse.

Messrs. Obama and Trump have demonstrated a lot more can be done through executive order than constitutional scholars had heretofore imagined, and only a president can sign off on spending bills. With a divided Congress, those provide opportunities for triangulation without number.

• Peter Morici is an economist and business professor at the University of Maryland, and a national columnist.